Cardiac response to relevant stimuli as an adjunctive tool for diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans

The cardiac responses of 91 Vietnam combat veterans, who either met ( n=57) or did not meet ( n=34) the DSM-III criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), were examined to a neutral stressor of mental arithmetic or to a relevant stressor of progressively louder (40 to 80 db) combat sounds. Examination of individual subject data reveals that one can accurately identify 70.2% of PTSD veterans and 88.2% of combat veterans, with only 9.7% false positives, using a single cutoff score on the highest heart rate response to combat sounds.