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A study of over 1,700 U.S. young people exposed to four major hurricanes found that just a few of them reported chronic stress, and the trajectories among most youth reflected recovery or low-decreasing post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptoms, according to research recently published in
JAMA Network Open.
Titled Trajectories of Post-traumatic Stress in Youths After Natural Disasters, the inquiry, conducted from August 2017 to August 2020, combined data from four studies of youths ages six to 16 who attended schools near the respective destructive paths of Hurricanes Andrew (1992), Charley (2004), Ike (2005) and Katrina (2008), from three to 26 months following the disasters. Fifty-four percent of the subjects were female, and 46 percent identified as White non-Hispanic.