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Authors attempted to study 606 GW veterans from the 24th
Reserve Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (RNMCB-24), a unit which had
been studied several times previously by other investigators. 249 (41%)
participated. Participants were administered surveys of symptoms and possible
risk factors and psychological testing. 175 (70%) of participants reported
having had a serious health problem since returning from the GW. Of these
175, 91% felt that their illnesses were certainly or probably due to exposures
received during the GW. Through a complicated mathematical technique called
factor analysis, the authors were able to derive 6 different groupings
of symptoms which they termed "Syndromes" in 63 (25%) of the
participants. Participants with Syndromes 2 ("confusion-ataxia")
and 4 ("phobia-apraxia) were more likely to be unemployed than those
with no health problems. Unemployment among those with Syndromes 1, 3,
5, and 6 and among those with serious health problems (but none of the
syndromes) was not significantly different from that of veterans with
no serious health problems. Psychological testing disclosed similar profiles
across the participants in each of the six syndromes. The authors conclude
that the reported symptom Syndromes may represent generalized neurologic
injuries possibly due to exposures to neurotoxins occurring during the
GW. Limitations of the study are the low response rate (41%), the prior
knowledge that this group had a high prevalence of reported symptoms (representativeness),
the fact that the participants’ average age (41) was significantly
greater than GW veterans as a whole (29), the self-reporting of all health
outcomes and the lack of information about diagnosed illnesses, lack of
definition of "serious illness", the failure to exclude patients
with diagnoses clearly unrelated to the GW, and the employment of factor
analysis, a mathematical technique which has debatable relevance to the
diagnosis and treatment of disease. Other limitations revolve around the
failure to report various types of clinical data that may be relevant
to the veterans’ symptoms. |
