Expertises

Psychological trauma, including the spectrum of different trauma-related reactions like:  PTSD, Complex PTSD, dissociation, and personality disorders.

Special expertise in refugee and childhood trauma.

Statistical methodology: mixture models and psychometrics (including IRT and network-models) 

Main research areas

Complex PTSD/DESNOS/CPTSD in traumatized refugees

evidence based treatment individualization for traumatized refugees 

Current research

Validating Complex PTSD in the Danish Trauma Database

The Danish Trauma Database (DTD) is a national collaboration of outpatient clinics for traumatized refugees. For an annual flow of 1200-1400 patients DTD collects background- and treatment monitoring data. One objective of DTD Data Wave 2(DW2) is to re-calibrate DTD to ICD-11, which uses new PTSD-, and complex PTSD (CPTSD) diagnoses. CPTSD is for the first time in history introduced in diagnostic nomenclature, but it is clinically unvalidated in refugees. Further, due to use of too small samples, treatment outcome predictors are seldom replicated in refugee studies. The objectives of Phase 1 under DW2 are to

1) validate the CPTSD diagnosis in a representative refugee patient-population

2) develop culturally sensitive clinical measures for the use of CPTSD, and

3) identify, using advanced statistics and the large DW2 sample, robust associations between refugee-patient characteristics, and differential treatment outcomes pre- and post- the introduction ICD-11's CPTSD.

Potential conflicts of interest

None.