The Combat Exposure Scale: a systematic assessment of trauma in the Vietnam War.

Although symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are expected to persist for many years, there is often no systematic assessment of Vietnam veterans' combat experiences. A study of 43 help-seeking Vietnam veterans revealed that a reliable assessment of war trauma, the Combat Exposure Scale, could be constructed from dichotomous questions about seven stressful events. Scale scores related significantly to current diagnosis of PTSD and intensity of symptoms. The Guttman scaling technique resulted in an ordering of events that provides clinically relevant information about the nature of trauma in the Vietnam War.