"Will it work for me?" Developing patient-friendly graphical displays of posttraumatic stress disorder treatment effectiveness

The goal of this study was to create simple visual displays to help patients understand the benefits of evidence-based treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We reviewed randomized trials of the most effective individual, trauma-focused psychotherapies and first-line antidepressants for adults with PTSD. The analytic sample included 65 treatment arms from 41 trials. We used binomial logistic regression to estimate the proportion of participants who lost their PTSD diagnosis at posttreatment and created a sample icon array to display these estimates. We provide a range of estimates (0-100) based on varying the percentage of the sample with a military affiliation. The percentage of participants who no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD among civilian populations was 64.3% for trauma-focused treatment, 56.9% for SSRI/SNRI, and 16.7% for waitlist/minimal attention. For military populations, the proportions of participants who no longer met the diagnostic criteria were 44.2%, 36.7%, and 8.1%, respectively. We present icon arrays for 0%, 7%, 50%, and 100% military affiliation displaying 100 icons, a portion of which were shaded to indicate the number of participants that no longer met the PTSD criteria following treatment. After evidence-based treatment, between one third and two thirds of participants no longer met the PTSD criteria. Providers can use the icon array developed in this study with patients to facilitate communication regarding PTSD treatment effectiveness.