Stress After Car Crash Affects Women More: Study

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By Emma Hitt, PhD

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) After a car accident, women may be more likely than men to experience symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and may need to be treated with different medications than men, researchers suggest.

About one third of people experience an episode of PTSD after a serious car crash, and women are more than four times as likely as men to experience this psychiatric disorder postcrash, investigators have found.

PTSD was once thought to be mostly a disorder of war veterans who had been involved in heavy combat. But it can occur following any highly stressful experience, causing its victims to relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, but at the same time, causing them to feel detached or estranged.

In general, women are more than twice as likely as men to develop PTSD during their lifetime. But women are also more susceptible to depression and anxiety disorders, which can also increase the risk of PTSD.

Dr. Carol S. Fullerton of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues wanted to find out if the increased risk of depression and anxiety disorders among women also contributed to their increased risk of PTSD.

In the study, Fullerton's team asked 64 men and 58 women to fill out a questionnaire one month after a serious car accident. According to the report in the September issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, women were at greater risk of intense feelings of distress than men when faced with a situation similar to the car accident and were more likely to report a physical reaction to memories of it.

``Females were almost four times more likely than males to report avoiding thoughts, feelings or conversations about the motor vehicle accident and were more likely to report loss of interest in significant activities,'' Fullerton told Reuters Health.

They were also ``three times more likely to experience a sense of a foreshortened future and more often reported trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating and being easily startled,'' she said.

According to Fullerton, prior trauma, major depression or anxiety disorders do not explain the gender differences in the specific symptoms of PTSD, and ``may indicate that men and women should be treated differently with therapeutic interventions,'' she concluded.