There are 9.4 million military veterans receiving Social Security benefits, which means that almost one out of every four adult Social Security beneficiaries has served in the United States military. In addition, veterans and their families make up almost 40 percent of the adult Social Security beneficiary population. Policymakers are particularly interested in military veterans and their famil...

OBJECTIVE Quality of life measures can provide an important source of medical information for promoting the health status of chronically ill patients. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate health related quality of life in psychiatric veterans of the Iraq- Iran war of the 1980s. METHODS They were out patients diagnosed with various psychiatric symptoms. The present study used a cro...

Depleted uranium (DU) is a high density heavy metal that has been used in military munitions since the 1991 Gulf War. DU is weakly radioactive and chemically toxic. Long term exposure can cause adverse health effects. This study assessed genotoxic effects in DU exposed Gulf War I veterans as a function of uranium (U) body burden. Levels of urine U were used to categorize the cohort into low and...

An exaggerated response to emotional stimuli is among the many symptoms widely reported by veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. These symptomologies have been attributed to damage and dysfunction associated with deployment-related exposures. We collected event-related potential data from 22 veterans meeting Haley criteria for Gulf War (GW) Syndromes 1-3 and from 8 matched GW veteran controls,...

Recent research demonstrated a relation between traumatic brain injury (TBI), health symptoms and diagnosis of Gulf War Illness (GWI) in Gulf War Veterans, but no study has examined the impact of multiple mild TBIs (mTBIs). A total of 229 male Gulf War Veterans from the Ft Devens Cohort were categorized by a number of mTBIs reported. One-way ANOVA and chi-square test of independence were used t...

Numerous studies have investigated the health problems reported by veterans of the Persian Gulf War, but important questions remain. Epidemiologic studies have consistently indicated that Gulf War veterans report unexplained symptoms at significantly higher rates than veteran comparison groups but that they have not experienced excess rates of disease-related mortality. Addressing unanswered qu...

We investigated the relationships between secondary traumatization, marital adjustment, and self-rated health among wives of former prisoners of war. Participants were Israeli wives of former prisoners of war (N = 116) and a matched control group of wives of combat veterans (N = 56). Wives of former prisoners of war reported worse self-rated health compared to the control group of wives of comb...

A previous epidemiologic study demonstrated no unexplained increase in risk for postwar hospitalization among Gulf War veterans who had remained on active duty. The authors sought to expand this study to include Reserve and separated military personnel. They examined hospitalization data from the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the California Office of Statew...

Although highly researched among veterans, the underlying mechanisms of suicidal ideation (SI) among former prisoners of war (ex-POWs), especially in the long-term, have rarely been investigated. Furthermore, while posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and loneliness have been individually associated with veteran SI, and both may be differentially implicated by captivity versus war traumas, the ...

Terence M. Keane, PhD For nearly 30 years, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has led the scientific study of the effects of war on combatants. Beginning with the development of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the American Psychiatric Association (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Third Edition) and World Health Organization (International ...