The present study investigated the symptoms of PTSD in a large
sample of patients from VA primary care settings. As predicted and
consistent with other recent research (Gros et al., 2010), the findings
demonstrated that participants with psychiatric diagnoses (MDD
and/or PTSD) reported more severe symptoms than participants
without a psychiatric diagnosis (no MDD and/or PTSD) and participants
with comorbid MDD and PTSD reported more severe symptoms
than participants with a single diagnosis (MDD or PTSD). It also was
predicted that participants with MDD-alone and PTSD-alone would
report similar levels of nonspecific symptoms of PTSD and dissimilar
levels of specific symptoms of PTSD, as identified in the previous literature
(Gros et al., 2010). Contrary to these predictions, participants
with MDD-alone and PTSD-alone consistently reported comparable
symptom levels across each of the PTSD symptom scales.