In reply
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to Dr Carroll's concerns. We appreciate his questions and concerns.
First, we must disagree that“this report suffers from serious deficiencies in design and in critical interpretation” and that“the evidence does not support the conclusions.” Although Dr Carroll's concerns are understandable, we have responded to each of them.
1.“A statistically significant triple interaction among allele carrier status, PTSD status, and baseline serum cortisol concentration or change in cortisol concentration with dexamethasone administration does not identify a specific dysfunction or a PTSD subtype. Further to the fictive status of these proposals, operational definitions of the supposed subtypes of PTSD were not given.”