CARIT Collaborations and Related Projects
The Injury Center’s behavioral researchers are involved in a number of related projects with colleagues at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.
The Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress
The Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress (CPTS) at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia develops and evaluates empirically-based interventions for children who have experienced traumatic stress due to medical illness or injury, and their families.
This includes developing manualized "best practice" protocols for preventing and treating traumatic stress, and establishing service delivery models to integrate prevention and treatment into healthcare and school-based systems. Current areas of intervention development focus on traumatic stress related to life-threatening illness, acute injury and critical care.
The Injury Center team worked collaboratively with CPTS on projects aimed at improving communication about traumatic stress post-injury between acute and follow-up care settings.
Evaluating acute stress and PTSD in violently injured youth
Emergency medical settings can play a crucial role in assessing violently injured youth and responding in ways that help to promote positive recovery and to reduce the risk of later PTSD.
In collaboration with colleagues in the Divisions of Emergency Medicine at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, we are investigating acute stress in children, adolescents and young adults who are injured by interpersonal violence.
These studies have shown that it is feasible to assess immediate responses in the Emergency Department, that acute stress is common in these youth, with about 30 percent experiencing multiple types of acute stress symptoms, and that the degree of acute stress is associated with the degree of PTSD symptoms assessed several months later.
Acute and long-term stress responses of parents in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU)
Parents may be at risk for post traumatic stress symptoms when their severely ill or injured child is admitted to the intensive care unit. In collaboration with colleagues in the Division of Critical Care Medicine and the Department of Psychology, we conducted a prospective study was conducted examining parents' responses during and after their child's intensive care admission.
This study explored potential risk factors, and assessed the post traumatic stress symptom constellation as a potentially useful way to understand parents' responses to this difficult experience. Results from the study show that one-third of parents met criteria for a diagnosis of ASD while their child was in the PICU, and a fifth met criteria for PTSD several months later. ASD symptoms were quite common among parents of children in the PICU, and many parents continued to report their symptoms months after their child was discharged.
Parental posttraumatic stress responses did not correlate with objective measures of severity of illness, but were related to parent perceptions of life threat for their child and to parent acute stress reactions in the PICU.
A recent study in the PICU aimed to develop a practical screening measure for the children admitted to the PICU and their parents. Identifying individuals at risk for traumatic stress with an empirically-validated screening measure may help in the development and provision of effective treatment or preventive interventions that would ameliorate the affects of trauma on children and their parents.