Findings indicated that although studies generally met st and ards in several quality areas , there is still room for improvement .
Areas for improvement include establishing representativeness , adequately describing clinical and demographic characteristics of the sample , and presenting better descriptions of important aspects of test and reference st and ard execution .
In addition , study quality has not appreciably improved since the publication of the STARD Statement in 2003 .
Despite the popularity of the PTSD Checklist ( PCL ) as a clinical screening test , there has been no comprehensive quality review of studies evaluating its diagnostic accuracy .
Validation of the PTSD checklist in an HMO sample of women.
Although Post-traumatic Stress Disorder ( PTSD ) is common among patients seeking care at medical clinics , little is known about the performance of screening instruments for this disorder in these setting s. Previous studies of acute trauma population s using the  PTSD Checklist ( PCL )  have suggested that scores of 45 - 50 provide the best discrimination between cases and noncases . We gave the PCL  to 1,225 r and omly selected women enrolled in an HMO . After interviewing a sample of 261 of these women using a structured , clinician-administered PTSD interview , we compared the results of the PCL to the clinician interviews over a range of possible cut scores using Receiver Operating Characteristic analysis . The optimum balance of sensitivity and specificity for this population was a score of 30 , yielding a sensitivity of.82 and specificity of.76 . The positive and negative likelihood ratios for this cut score were 3.40 and 0.24 , respectively . By comparison , the use of 45 as a cut score would result in very low sensitivity ( .36 ) in this setting . The lower cut score found in this study may indicate that the use of previously published cut scores of 45 - 50 may not optimize the function of the PCL as a screening tool outside of acute trauma setting s due to an unacceptably high number of false negative cases
Findings indicated that although studies generally met st and ards in several quality areas , there is still room for improvement .
Areas for improvement include establishing representativeness , adequately describing clinical and demographic characteristics of the sample , and presenting better descriptions of important aspects of test and reference st and ard execution .
In addition , study quality has not appreciably improved since the publication of the STARD Statement in 2003 .
Despite the popularity of the PTSD Checklist ( PCL ) as a clinical screening test , there has been no comprehensive quality review of studies evaluating its diagnostic accuracy .