Credit Newswise — One in four Gulf War veterans suffers from Gulf War Illness (GWI). The condition is characterized by unexplainable chronic fatigue, muscle pain and cognitive dysfunction and may be associated with exposure to chemicals, many identified as genotoxins, during deployment. Previous studies suggest that the symptoms of GWI are due to dysfunction of the mitochondria, the site in cells where molecules that power the body’s processes are produced. Not producing enough energy slows down the body and leaves the individual feeling tired. New preliminary research to be presented at Physiological Bionergetics: From Bench to Bedside shows for the first time direct evidence of greater mitochondrial damage in Gulf War veterans. The mitochondrion has its own DNA, separate from the cell’s, that encodes the proteins needed to produce the molecules that power the body’s processes. Damage to the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) directly affects the mitochondria’s ability to function and produce energy. Increases in the amount of mtDNA have been associated with disease. In this study, researchers measured the mtDNA amount and degree of mtDNA damage in blood cells from blood samples from veterans with GWI. Compared with healthy non-deployed controls, Gulf War veterans had more mtDNA content and greater mtDNA damage. According to the researchers, these findings further support that mitochondrial dysfunction may be involved in GWI. “Future studies are necessary to confirm these findings and determine their association with mitochondrial function. Work in this area may guide new diagnostic testing and treatments for veterans suffering from GWI,” the researchers wrote.
* Despite having access to health care, male veterans report poorer health than men in active duty, men in the National Guard and Reserves, and civilian men.* Men in the National Guard and Reserves were less likely to have health insurance than civilians, veterans or active duty servicemen.* Veterans and active duty servicemen report higher rates of smoking, tobacco use and drinking to excess than civilian men. Credit Newswise — Even with access to health care, male military veterans are in poorer health than men in active military duty, men in the National Guard and Reserves, and civilian men, finds a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study concluded that organizations that serve veterans should increase efforts at preventing poor health behaviors and linking them to health care services. The findings are from a 2010 survey of 53,000 veterans, 3,700 Guard and Reserve members, 2,000 active duty servicemen and 110,000 civilians. The survey included questions about their health and health behaviors, and their access to health care. A similar study of women veterans, National Guard/Reserve members, active servicewomen and civilians was published earlier this year by the same research team. "We think our research substantiates claims that veterans bear a disproportionate disease burden," said Katherine D. Hoerster, Ph.D., MPH, a research psychologist at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle. Survey results found that veterans were more likely than active duty men to report diabetes. Veterans were more likely to report current smoking and heavy alcohol consumption than men in the National Guard and Reserves and civilian men and a lack of exercise compared to active duty and National Guard and Reserve. National Guard and Reserve men had higher obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease (versus active duty and veteran men, active duty men, and civilian men, respectively). Active duty men were more likely to report current smoking and heavy alcohol consumption than civilians and National Guard and Reserves, and reported more smokeless tobacco use than civilians. While the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) addresses these common health concerns, Hoerster noted that only 37 percent of eligible veterans receive care through the VA system of hospitals. In addition, National Guard and Reserve servicemen were found to be the least likely of the groups to have access to health care. The researchers advised that other health care providers need to be aware of the prevalence of these health issues facing Guard and Reserve servicemen and veterans. The finding that National Guard and Reserve members have poorer access to care should be addressed, Hoerster added. "This is an important military sub-population to target." One factor may be that members of the National Guard and Reserves are not linked up to services provided by the VA as effectively as active duty service members are when they leave the military, she noted. The greater prevalence of heart problems and diabetes reported by these servicemen makes poor access to care even more problematic, she said. Increased rates of tobacco and alcohol use reported by active duty servicemen can lead to greater health problems for this group in the future, Hoerster said. "Addressing tobacco and alcohol use should also be a top priority." Other research has suggested that veterans have a higher disease burden because of their military service, said Joy Ilem, deputy national legislative director for Disabled American Veterans, an organization that serves veterans and provides assistance in learning about and applying for benefits. However, it is surprising that this study found that veterans have poorer health outcomes and poorer health behavior than other groups given the emphasis that the VA puts on prevention of disease and promotion of a healthy lifestyle, Ilem observed. "Not all vets have a connection to the VA system, but they may need one in the future," she added. Veterans who have health issues directly related to their service are more likely to use VA facilities and are more likely to be sicker than the overall population of veterans, Ilem added.
Credit Newswise — An estimated 15-20 percent of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from some form of traumatic brain injury (TBI) sustained during their deployment, with most injuries caused by blast waves from exploded military ordnance. The obvious cognitive symptoms of minor TBI -- including learning and memory problems -- can dissipate within just a few days. But blast-exposed veterans may continue to have problems performing simple auditory tasks that require them to focus attention on one sound source and ignore others, an ability known as "selective auditory attention." According to a new study by a team of Boston University (BU) neuroscientists, such apparent "hearing" problems actually may be caused by diffuse injury to the brain's prefrontal lobe. "This kind of injury can make it impossible to converse in everyday social settings, and thus is a truly devastating problem that can contribute to social isolation and depression," explains computational neuroscientist Scott Bressler, a graduate student in BU's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, led by biomedical engineering professor Barbara Shinn-Cunningham. For the study, Bressler, Shinn-Cunningham and their colleagues -- in collaboration with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder expert Yelena Bogdanova of VA Healthcare Boston -- presented a selective auditory attention task to 10 vets with mild TBI and to 17 control subjects without brain injuries. Notably, on average, veterans had hearing within a normal range. In the task, three different melody streams, each comprised of two notes, were simultaneously presented to the subjects from three different perceived directions (this variation in directionality was achieved by differing the timing of the signals that reached the left and right ears). The subjects were then asked to identify the "shape" of the melodies (i.e., "going up," "going down," or "zig-zagging") while their brain activity was measured by electrodes on the scalp. "Whenever a new sound begins, the auditory cortex responds, encoding the sound onset," Bressler explains. "Attentional focus, however, changes the strength of this response: when a listener is attending to a particular sound source, the neural activity in response to that sound is greater." This change of the neural response occurs because the brain's "executive control" regions, located in the brain's prefrontal cortex, send signals to the auditory sensory regions of the brain, modulating their response. The researchers found that blast-exposed veterans with TBI performed worse on the task -- that is, they had difficulty controlling auditory attention -- "and in all of the TBI veterans who performed well enough for us to measure their neural activity, 6 out of our 10 initial subjects, the brain response showed weak or no attention-related modulation of auditory responses," Bressler says. "Our hope is that some of our findings can be used to develop methods to assess and quantify TBI, identifying specific factors that contribute to difficulties communicating in everyday settings," he says. "By identifying these factors on an individual basis, we may be able to define rehabilitation approaches and coping strategies tailored to the individual." Some TBI patients also go on to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) -- a debilitating progressive degenerative disease with symptoms that include dementia, memory loss and depression -- which can now only be definitively diagnosed after death. "With any luck," Bressler adds, "neurobehavioral research like ours may help identify patients at risk of developing CTE long before their symptoms manifest."
Credit Newswise — When members of the U.S. military leave the service, they tend to settle in neighborhoods with greater overall diversity than their civilian counterparts of the same race, according to a new study that was presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). “It’s encouraging that having served in the military appears to have a long-term impact on how people choose their neighborhoods,” said study co-author Mary J. Fischer, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. “According to the social contact hypothesis, racial attitudes are improved and stereotypes are broken when diverse groups come together under circumstances that promote meaningful cross-group interaction, such as in the military.” Using data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act on 13 million home mortgage loans from 2008 to 2013 across 98 metropolitan areas, the study represented the first and largest examination of residential integration among white, black, and Latino homeowners. The researchers compared conventional mortgages with Veterans Affairs mortgages to determine differences in residential patterns between veterans and civilians, and controlled for a number of variables that could explain where people lived, including partnership status, income, and metropolitan characteristics. U.S. cities remain highly segregated by race despite several decades of laws against discrimination in housing and lending, according to Fischer. “One of the reasons racial segregation may self-perpetuate is that many whites have grown up in homogeneous communities and thus are more prone to rely on stereotypes to understand out-groups,” Fischer said. Fischer and her co-author Jacob S. Rugh, an assistant professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, note that making decisions on where to live after serving in the military is a strong test of the premise that prolonged interracial contact will have a positive effect on long-term intergroup relationships. Fischer said this study along with related research she is working on with colleagues contribute to society’s understanding of the potential longer-term effects of military service on race relations.
Credit Newswise — To the nearly 2 million people in the U.S. living with the loss of a limb, including U.S. military veterans, prosthetic devices provide restored mobility yet lack sensory feedback. A team of engineers and researchers at Washington University in St. Louis is working to change that so those with upper limb prosthetics can feel hot and cold and the sense of touch through their prosthetic hands. Daniel Moran, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and of neurobiology, of physical therapy and of neurological surgery at the School of Medicine, has received a three-year, nearly $1.9 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to test a novel device his lab developed that would stimulate the nerves in the upper arm and forearm. If it works, upper-limb amputees who use motorized prosthetic devices would be able to feel various sensations through the prosthetic, which would send sensory signals to the brain. DARPA is already funding the “Luke Arm,” a high-tech bionic limb created by DEKA Research. The prosthetic, named for “Star Wars” character Luke Skywalker, who received a prosthetic after losing his right hand in an epic battle with Darth Vader, is designed to help servicemen and women and veterans who had upper limb amputations. While the advanced prosthetic arm allows users to perform six different grips, such as picking up small objects, it does not provide users with the senses of touch and orientation of a natural hand. Moran, whose expertise is in motor neurophysiology and brain-computer interfaces, and his team have developed an electrode designed to stimulate sensory nerve cells in the ulnar and median nerves in the arms. The ulnar nerve, one of three main nerves in the forearm, is the largest nerve in the body unprotected by muscle or bone and is connected to the ring finger and pinkie finger on the hand. It’s the nerve that is stimulated when you hit your elbow on something and trigger your “funny bone.” The median nerve in the upper arm and shoulder is connected to the other fingers on the hand, so together, the two nerves control movement and sensations including touch, pressure, vibration, heat, cold and pain in all of the fingers. People using arm prosthetics have to rely on their vision to use them properly, Moran says. To pick up a cup of coffee, they have to be able to see the cup, place the fingers of the prosthesis around it and lift it. They are unable to feel whether the cup is in their hand, if the cup is hot or cold or if they are about to drop it. By enabling the ability to feel, users will have more control over the prosthesis. Moran and his team, which includes Harold Burton, PhD, professor of neurobiology; Wilson (Zach) Ray, MD, assistant professor of neurological surgery, both at the School of Medicine; and Matthew MacEwen, who will graduate with an MD/PhD in May 2015 and worked on this project for his dissertation, have developed a macro-sieve peripheral nerve interface designed to stimulate regeneration of the ulnar and median nerves to transmit information back into the central nervous system. Ray will implant the device — which is made of an ultrathin, flexible material similar to a soft contact lens and is about 1/8th the size of a dime — into the forearms of anesthetized nonhuman primates. The research team will then determine the amount of sensory information that is encoded by providing low levels of stimulation to small groups of nerves. The device, which looks like a wagon wheel with open spaces between the “spokes,” allows the nerve to grow. Ray also will implant a small cuff electrode, the current standard of care, to compare the performance. Once implanted, Moran and the team will train the nonhuman primates to play a joystick-controlled video game in which the team will give them cues as to where to move the joystick by stimulating specific sectors in the ulnar and median nerves so it feels as if someone is touching them, Moran said. Their reward for advancing through the various stages of the game successfully is fruit-flavored juice.
“We want to determine what they can perceive through artificial stimulation of the nerves,” Moran says. “If we stimulate a particular sector of the nerve, that tells them to reach to a specific target. Using very low levels of stimulation (i.e. sensation), we want to figure out how many different nerve sectors we can independently encode with a unique target location.” In particular, Moran and the team will analyze how many different independent channels they can stimulate on the nerve to determine how many sensors will work on the prosthetic hand. Using a method called current steering, they can move different amounts of current around the nerve to activate different sectors to connect the touch sensors on the hand to a different sector on the nerve. His team has already had success with this method in motor neurons in a rat model. “If this works to stimulate motor neurons in muscles, we can certainly stimulate sensory neurons, and that’s never been done in a behavioral model in nonhuman primates,” Moran says. Burton, an expert in sensory neurophysiology, will analyze how the brain processes the feedback from the nerve stimulation. “The more real estate the brain uses, the more processing power and the more important something is,” Moran says. “The hand area in the somatosensory cortex is a big piece of brain, so there should be a lot of bandwidth. We think we’ll be able to send a lot of information to it.” Moran and his team will work with DARPA to determine how many sensors to put on the prosthetic hands. “If the nervous system can’t handle more than eight or 10 channels, there is no sense in putting more on there,” he says. “We want to find the bandwidth and what the nervous system can interpret with artificial sensation.” The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 91 tenured/tenure-track and 40 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, more than 900 graduate students and more than 23,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.
Credit Newswise — The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) today announced that with a new grant of $60,000 from the Jonas Center for Nursing and Veterans Healthcare, matched by $40,000 of its own monies, it will fund the scholarship of five doctoral nursing students in 2016. As a recipient of the Jonas Center grant, Penn Nursing is part of a national effort to stem the faculty shortage and prepare the next generation of nurses – critical as a clinical nurse shortage is anticipated just as an aging population requires care. The Penn Nursing Jonas Scholars join more than 1,000 future nurse educators and leaders at 140 universities across all 50 states supported by Jonas Center programs, the Jonas Nurse Leaders Scholars Program and Jonas Veterans Healthcare Program (JVHP). These scholarships support nurses pursuing PhDs and DNPs, the terminal degrees in the field. As the nation’s leading philanthropic funder of graduate nursing education, the Jonas Center is addressing the critical need for qualified nursing faculty. U.S. nursing schools turned away nearly 70,000 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2014 due in large part to an insufficient number of faculty . Further, nearly two-thirds of registered nurses over age 54 say they are considering retirement . “In 2008, we set an ambitious goal to support 1,000 Jonas Nurse Scholars. This year, on our Center’s 10th anniversary, we celebrate this achievement and are amazed by the talent of this cohort of future nurse leaders,” said Donald Jonas, who co-founded the Center with Barbara Jonas, his wife. “In the decade to come, we look forward to continuing to work with our partner nursing schools and to the great impact that the Jonas Scholars will have on improving healthcare around the world.”The Penn Nursing Jonas Scholars will begin their graduate careers in the fall and will be supported through 2018. ###About the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing is one of the world’s leading schools of nursing and is ranked the #1 graduate nursing school in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. Penn Nursing is consistently among the nation’s top recipients of nursing research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Penn Nursing prepares nurse scientists and nurse leaders to meet the health needs of a global society through research, education, and practice.
Credit Newswise — One in ten patients is at risk of having new post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to their ICU experience up to a year post-discharge. This was the finding from a multicenter, prospective cohort research study of veterans and civilians. The research was published online ahead of print in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. In the study “Incidence and Risk Factors for ICU-related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Veterans and Civilians,” researchers led by Mayur Patel, MD, MPH, FACS, Assistant Professor of Surgery & Neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Staff Surgeon and Surgical Intensivist at the Nashville VA Medical Center, analyze data from a cohort of medical and surgical ICU survivors enrolled in studies from three Veterans Affairs hospitals (MIND-ICU Study, NCT00400062) and one civilian hospital (BRAIN-ICU Study, NCT00392795). Using the PTSD Checklist for the DSM-IV to determine PTSD for this study, among PTSD measurements listed by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs’ National Center for PTSD, a total of 181 patients were assessed at three months and 160 were further assessed at 12 months. The cumulative incidence of PTSD was 6 percent to 12 percent within one year following hospitalization. “Although lower than prior research and public perception suggests, the rate of ICU-related PTSD is very comparable to the 8 percent PTSD rates seen in current and former service members deployed to the recent Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts,” Patel said. “It is important to understand more about PTSD following the traumatizing events of a critical illness so we can better support the growing number of ICU survivors.” PTSD can occur in patients after the traumatizing events of critical illness, and this study provides estimates on new cases of PTSD stemming specifically from the ICU experience. Pre-existing PTSD has rarely been systematically assessed in prior cohorts, and this study took extra effort to distinguish pre-existing PTSD from new PTSD cases. Civilian populations have dominated the literature of PTSD after critical illness, and this study is the first to also include the expanding and aging Veteran population. Assessing risk factors for ICU-related PTSD, the researchers found that pre-existing PTSD as well as prior depression were strong risk factors associated with ICU-related PTSD at three and 12 months post-discharge. Being a veteran did not increase risk of ICU-related PTSD, nor did duration of delirium, amount of pain medication, or amount of sedative. “Currently, the international psychological aftercare for ICU survivors is not organized proactively; rather, it is largely reactive in response to disabling reports from survivors, caregivers, and primary care providers. The Institute of Medicine in the United States has recommended a systematic collection, analysis, and dissemination of data assessing the quality of post-conflict PTSD care in the military and veteran populations. We suggest that the same should apply to the large civilian and veteran populations of critically ill survivors,” the authors advised.