PTSD associated with achieving fewer educational milestones

PTSD appeared associated with completion of fewer compulsory and postsecondary educational milestones, according to results of a population study published in JAMA Network Open.

“We aimed to investigate the association between PTSD and objective indicators of educational attainment across the life span using the Swedish national registers, which include independently and prospectively collected health care and academic data from primary to tertiary education for the whole population,” Alba Vilaplana-Pérez, MSc, of the department of clinical neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and colleagues wrote.

The investigators analyzed register data of 2,244,193 individuals who had at least one Swedish-born parent and were born between January 1973 and December 1997. The follow-up period ended Dec. 31, 2013, making the oldest age at follow-up 40 years. Outcome measures included finishing compulsory education, upper secondary education and a university degree, as well as starting a university degree.

Among the cohort, a total of 1,425,326 (919 with PTSD) finished compulsory education, 2,001,944 (2,013 with PTSD) finished upper secondary education, 1,796,407 (2,243 with PTSD) began a university degree and 1,356,741 (2,254 with PTSD) finished a university degree.

PTSD correlated with lower odds for completing each milestone, including finishing compulsory education (adjusted OR = 0.18; 95% CI, .15-.20), finishing secondary education (aOR = 0.13; 95% CI, .12-.14), beginning a university degree (aOR = 0.32; 95% CI, .28-.35) and finishing a university degree (aOR = 0.27; 95% CI, .28-.35). The researchers noted that analyses that excluded psychiatric comorbidities and were adjusted for completion of the previous milestone “did not statistically significantly alter the magnitude of the associations.”

“Posttraumatic stress disorder was associated with educational impairment across the life span, and the associations were not entirely explained by shared familial factors, psychiatric comorbidity or general cognitive ability,” the researchers wrote. “This finding highlights the importance of implementing early trauma-informed interventions in schools and universities to minimize the long-term socioeconomic consequences of academic failure in individuals with PTSD.”