An article published May 16, 2012 in the New York Times discusses similarities between combat veterans who are exposed to roadside bombs and a degenerative brain disease found in athletes. Essentially, football players who are tackled and punched have brain injuries similar to veterans who have lived through explosions.
This research was done at a Veterans Affairs center in Bedford, Massachusetts. The scientists call the damage to the brain by explosions chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. They replicated explosions on mice and found that within two weeks of the explosion, the CTE was evident. This research caused scientists to believe that many combat veterans have undiagnosed brain trauma and are in jeopardy of having neurological disease. Currently, the only way to determine if someone has CTE is through an autopsy, which is of course too late. This study will hopefully lead to the development of diagnostic testing and drug therapies for this disease.
These new findings cause many to wonder if veterans who have psychological and emotional problems after wartime may actually be suffering from brain injuries. Researchers at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University believe this is the case and that many of these veterans are experiencing some kind of organic brain injury. They think that veterans should receive treatment as well as disability compensation.
Compare these findings to retired NFL players. People have agreed that their behavioral problems stem from brain injuries, but people have not reached that agreement yet regarding service men.
More than 220,000 of the 2.3 million troops who have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 have been diagnosed with some kind of traumatic brain injury. It is impossible to know how many of these will actually develop CTE.
The research findings are being disputed by some experts who claim there was not sufficient data to link CTE with exposure to explosions. For the study, four veterans were autopsied and three of them had experienced head injuries from more than one source. Other scientists don’t believe the mice experiment is applicable to human subjects because humans may receive other head trauma in their lifetime. Others dispute the correlation between blast injuries and athletic injuries.
Even with the disagreements, this seems to be an issue that deserves further research. Proving CTE does exist in combat veterans may provide hope and comfort for families that are left behind.