A new report provides evidence linking traumatic brain injury sustained by troops in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to a variety of long-term health problems including dementia, aggression, depression and symptoms similar to those seen in Parkinson's disease.
But the Institute of Medicine committee charged with developing the report also pointed to a troubling lack of scientific data on such injuries, which are fairly recent in the history of warfare.
"The real bottom line significant finding is that there's not a good human literature on the kinds of neurotrauma seen in Iraq and Afghanistan caused by blasts," said Dr. George W. Rutherford, vice chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. "The human literature is really about people who've had [brain injury] from car crashes or falling down stairs and, in the military, from shrapnel or gunshots. We're all worried that blast neurotrauma hasn't really made it into the human literature."
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