If doctors knew which trauma survivors would develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, when the patients arrived at the emergency room, they could prevent it from occurring in the first place.

Sisi Ma, a research scientist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, presented her work trying to do just that at the Leveraging Big Data and Predictive Knowledge to Fight Disease conference at the New York Academy of Sciences on Tuesday. Their goal was to identify markers that could tell doctors which of their patients would be most likely to develop sustained stress or PTSD.

While most people eventually recover after experiencing traumatic events, about 10 to 20 percent of individuals experience long-term stress that can have sweeping psychological effects.

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