The impact of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology on quality of life: the sentinel experience of anger, hypervigilance and restricted affect

<p><strong>Background:</strong> It is unclear which specific symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are related to poor perceived quality of life.</p> <p><strong>Objective: </strong> To investigate the influence of post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology on quality of life in traumatic injury survivors. </p> <p><strong>Method: </strong> Traumatic injury survivors completed questionnaires on post-traumatic stress disorder symptomatology and quality of life at 3 months (<i>n</i> = 987), 12 months (<i>n</i> = 862), 24 months (<i>n</i> = 830) and 6 years (<i>n</i> = 613) post trauma. </p> <p><strong>Results: </strong> Low quality of life was reported by 14.5% of injury survivors at 3 months and 8% at 6 years post event. The post-traumatic stress disorder symptom clusters that contributed most to poor perceived quality of life were numbing and arousal, the individual symptoms that contributed most were anger, hypervigilance and restricted affect. </p> <p><strong>Conclusions: </strong> There was variability in the quality of life of traumatic injury survivors in the 6 years following trauma and a consistent proportion reported low quality of life. Early intervention to reduce anger, hypervigilance and restricted affect symptoms may provide a means to improving the quality of life of traumatic injury survivors.</p>