The recent bombing of the civilian population during the Persian Gulf War offers an important research opportunity in the context of ongoing epidemiological research that has been conducting in Israel since early 1983. This is the chance to study the immediate effects of a life-threatening experience, and to plan subsequent monitoring of long term effects on a sample of 669 young, Israel-born adults on whom detailed antecedent baseline data have been collected. These data consist of a greater variety of social, psychological and psychiatric variables than have even been obtained before on a general population sample prior to a crisis of war or natural disaster.
Specific aims are to assess the nature of the objective threat (e.g., residence in targeted Tel Aviv versus relatively safe Jerusalem), how the threat was defined subjectively, how the threat was reacted to (e.g., symptoms of PTSD and other evidence of psychological distress), and how these reactions were influenced by the objective threat, its subjective definition, and previously measured antecedent factors such as baseline distress and PTSD symptoms, baseline psychiatric diagnoses (especially RDC depression, anxiety disorder, substance use disorders, and antisocial personality), personality characteristics, and demographic characteristics. These questions will be answered by reinterviewing the above 669 persons to secure the relevant data by telephone for the majority and face to face for persons with no phones. These interviews will start on March 20, which is 3 weeks after the bombing threat ended. Both logistic regression and multiple regression will be included in the data analytic methods. The longer term goal is to conduct a more extensive and intensive follow-up of a variety of subsamples from the entire screened and diagnosed sample of 4,914 persons from whom the above 669 cases and controls were drawn for intensive study. This longer term follow-up would occur in 1993, ten years after the initial epidemiological field work began. Taken together, the on-going epidemiological research and the proposed study of the immediate effects of the war threat would provide an unprecedented opportunity to investigate how past social, psychological and psychiatric factors affect responses to a life-threatening experience and how such responses, in turn, are related to the future course and development of psychiatric disorders.
