Post-Traumatic stress, depression adding to health problems of soldiers with head injuries

Post-Traumatic stress, depression adding to health problems of soldiers with head injuries

www.reuters.com

BOSTON (Reuters) - Tests of 2,525 U.S. combat veterans after returning from Iraq have found that depression and post-traumatic stress disorder play key roles in determining who will suffer from health problems following a mild brain injury.

"We thought the symptoms would be related to concussion, but they turned out to be most strongly related to PTSD," said Dr. Charles Hoge, a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

The research, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, also suggests that the rate of such injuries is high.

"In this study, nearly 15 percent of soldiers reported an injury during deployment that involved loss of consciousness or altered mental status," Hoge and his colleagues reported.

More than 1.5 million Americans have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001, and some estimates of the rate of head and neck injuries as high as one in four.

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is an under-reported phenomenon in our troops IMO. We hear about the fatalities, but the amount of guys who survive with this type of injury and subsequent anguish is astronomical in proportion. As many as 1 in 4 soldiers may have sustained these types of injuries and mental aftermath. Out of 1.5 million, that amounts to nearly 400,000 men that may be contending with this.

Sad.

www.reuters.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 30-1-2008 by DimensionalDetective]

I'm suprised there was not 1 comment on this. We hear so much about how there has "only been 4,000 troops killed in several years of this conflict", yet not too many people take into accout how many more have been maimed, or have life-long psychological trauma such as these guys do. This is the casualties that slip through the cracks unnoticed, and it is a HUGE amount of men that are suffering from it.

PTSD isn't anything new. Guys coming back from every war have had it.

I read that you don't see too much of it from guys that fought in WW2 because once the war ended, they had to wait a while before they actually came back to the US, and when they did, most were sent back on ships and it gave them time to "decompress".

Glad to see they are aware of it now and treating it.