The evidence we found for high concentration of risk based on our model suggests that future research is needed both to create an assessment tool for use in the aftermath of disasters to measure key risk factors (i.e. disaster-related experiences, prior exposures to highly stressful experiences, and prior history of mental disorders) and to develop a prediction model that uses this information to generate individual-level PTSD risk scores to target high-risk survivors for preventive interventions. While the WMH results provide strong suggestive evidence that a useful model of this sort could be developed from self-report data, the WMH model itself is inadequate because it was based on coarse measures assessed retrospectively in a small sample.
