An evaluation of common risk factors for prolonged grief disorder using the international classification of diseases-11 criteria

Abstract

Objectives: Inclusion of Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) in the ICD-11 warrants examination of risk factors using diagnostic criteria as there is a paucity of research that has examined risk factors of PGD using the diagnostic criteria. This study examines if the identified risk factors for prolonged grief predict PGD using the diagnostic criteria across three samples.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey design was used to assess risk factors and PG-13 in three distinct samples of bereaved adults. The PG-13 was either parsed dichotomously using the ICD-11 diagnostic criteria to indicate presence of PGD or summed to index general grief severity.

Results: When using ICD-11 diagnostic criteria, only female gender and high levels of pre-loss contact were identified in separate samples as increasing risk of diagnosis. The most replicable results across samples were found when using the summed PG-13 symptom scores. When using the PG-13 total score, younger age and more pre-loss contact with the deceased were associated with higher symptom levels, which replicated in all three studies.

Conclusions: This study provided evidence that the extant literature using summed scores to explore risk factors might not generalize to the ICD-11 diagnostic criteria.

Keywords:

• Prolonged grief disorder
• international classification of diseases
• risk factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, Jonathan Singer. The data are not publicly available due to the data containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.