OBJECTIVES To examine the contribution of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and physical health to subjective age among war veterans. METHOD The sample included 502 veterans of the first Lebanon War who were assessed 20 years after the war by a series of self-report questionnaires. Data analyses included descriptive statistics, hierarchical and logistic regressions. RESULTS Veterans with...

1 The Iowa Persian Gulf Study Group. Self-reported illnesses and health status among Gulf war veterans. A population based study. JAMA 1997;277:238-45. 2 Kang H, Mahan C, Lee K, Magee C, Murphy F. Illnesses among United States veterans of the Gulf war: a population-based survey of 30,000 veterans. J Occup Environ Med 2000;42:491-501. 3 Gray G, Smith T, Kang H, Knoke J. Are Gulf veterans sufferi...

Many U.S. military veterans lack health insurance and are ineligible for care in Veterans Administration health care facilities. Using two recently released national government surveys--the 2004 Current Population Survey and the 2002 National Health Interview Survey--the authors examined how many veterans are uninsured (lacking health insurance coverage and not receiving care from the VA) and w...

BACKGROUND Hundreds of thousands of soldiers face exposure to combat during wars across the globe. The health effects of traumatic war experiences have not been adequately assessed across the lifetime of these veterans. OBJECTIVE To identify the role of traumatic war experiences in predicting postwar nervous and physical disease and mortality using archival data from military and medical reco...

Chemical warfare agents are the most brutal weapons among the weapons of mass destruction. Sulfur mustard (SM) is a potent toxic alkylating agent known as “the King of the Battle Gases”. SM has been the most widely used chemical weapon during the wars. It was widely used in World War I. Thereafter, it was extensively employed by the Iraqi troops against the Iranian military personnel and even c...

To the Editor: We studied all active-duty Persian Gulf War–era veterans who remained on active duty at the conclusion of deployment (July 31, 1991), not as Leisure et al. stated in their letter “selected, mostly healthy, active-duty Persian Gulf War veterans enlisted as of 1994.” Our study was restricted to hospitalizations of active-duty service members because these were the only service memb...

Aggressive and unsafe driving was examined in 474 male veterans receiving Veterans Affairs residential treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Specifically, the authors evaluated if PTSD was associated with aggressive and unsafe driving and if Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans were at higher risk than other war veterans. Approximately two thirds of the sample reported lifetime aggre...

AIMS To investigate whether Australian Gulf War veterans have a higher than expected prevalence of recent symptoms and medical conditions that were first diagnosed in the period following the 1991 Gulf War; and if so, whether these effects were associated with exposures and experiences that occurred in the Gulf War. METHODS Cross-sectional study of 1456 Australian Gulf War veterans and a comp...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to examine whether inappropriate cardiovascular responses to stressors may underlie symptoms in Gulf War veterans with chronic fatigue. METHODS Psychophysiological stress testing was performed on 51 Gulf War veterans with chronic fatigue (using the 1994 case definition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and 42 healthy veterans. Hemodyn...