Traumatic events. e.g., road traffic accidents, violent conflicts, natural and human-made disasters, are common in sub-Saharan Africa. However, validated trauma screening tools to assess trauma at the individual level are lacking in many sub-Saharan African countries, such as Ethiopia, which limits accurate diagnosis and effective care provision.

We sought to measure trauma exposure among cases and controls and evaluate the psychometric properties of the Life Events Checklist for DSM-5 (LEC-5) among Ethiopian adults.

This study included 4,183 participants (2,255 cases with a clinical diagnosis of psychosis and 1,928 controls without a history of psychosis) from the Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Populations-Psychosis (NeuroGAP-Psychosis) study. We conducted exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to group the items into factors/subscales, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to investigate the best model fit in Ethiopia.

48.7% of participants reported exposure to at least one traumatic event. Physical assault (19.6%), sudden violent death (12.0%), and sudden accidental death (10.9%) were the three most common traumatic experiences. Cases were twice as likely to report experiences of traumatic events compared to controls (p<0.001). EFA revealed a four-factor/subscale model. CFA results indicated a theoretically-driven seven-factor model to be the preferred model by the goodness of fit (comparative fit index of 0.965 and Tucker-Lewis index of 0.951) and accuracy (root mean square error of approximation of 0.019).

Exposure to traumatic events was common in Ethiopia, even more so for individuals with a diagnosis of psychotic disorders. The LEC-5 demonstrated good construct validity for measuring traumatic events among Ethiopian adults. Future studies that examine criterion validity and test-retest reliability of the LEC-5 in Ethiopia are warranted.