Young Gulf veterans suffer most mental health disorders

Most of the soldiers returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from trauma-induced mental health conditions, more than half of them with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, a new research carried out by US researchers has found.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco VA Medical Center discovered that nearly a third of veterans received care from Veterans Affairs (VA) between 2001 and 2005 returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health or psychosocial illness.

To reach the conclusion, the researchers reviewed data collected on 103,788 veterans, half of whom were National Guard or Reserves, while about 13 percent were women, 54 percent under age 30 and nearly a third minorities.

Of the total, 31% or 32,010 were diagnosed with mental health and/or psychosocial problems, including 25% or 25,658 who received mental health diagnoses. More than half or 56% of these patients had two or more distinct conditions.

After observing the data, researchers found that post-traumatic stress disorder was the most common disorder, with the 13,205 Gulf war veterans who got the diagnosis accounting for more than half or 52% of mental health diagnoses.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a potentially devitalizing condition that can occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event like a natural disaster or a serious accident, can lead to depression, substance abuse, problems of memory and cognition, and other problems of physical and mental health.

PTSD is characterized by anxiety, re-experiences of the event through flashbacks and nightmares and avoidance of stimuli associated with the experience. People suffering from this disorder often remain sleepless, agitated and disturbed, and feel detached or estranged from loved ones.

Those at greater risk were the youngest soldiers, aged 18 to 24 years, and those with the most combat exposure, said Dr. Karen H. Seal at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, stressing for more emphasis on the mental wounds of war.

"Our results signal a need for improvements in the primary prevention of military service-related mental health disorders, particularly among our youngest service members," Seal wrote in the study that published in the March 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Besides the high rate of mental health disorders, about one in three or 31 percent were affected by at least one psychosocial diagnosis. Other diagnoses included anxiety disorder-24%, adjustment disorder-24 percent, depression-20 percent and substance abuse-20 percent.

Of all Gulf war veterans who sought VA services, PTSD affected 13 percent, slightly less than the 15.2 percent tallied for veterans of the Vietnam War, but far above the 3.5 percent reported in the general population.

The researchers noticed very little difference between men and women, racial and ethnic subgroups and those on active duty and National Guard or Reserves.

In January this year, a groundbreaking study of military veterans of World War II and Korea, conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, linked post traumatic stress with an increased risk of heart disease, complimenting the existing facts that veterans with PTSD have more autoimmune diseases, such as arthritis and psoriasis.