The journal Nature reports that repeated concussions on the battlefield leads to a heightened likelihood that vets coming back from combat will face Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. An excerpt:
“…an increasing body of evidence suggests that the repeated concussions have left them with an invisible, subcellular-level form of traumatic brain injury (TBI) that not only impairs their day-to-day functioning, but also increases their long-term risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases.
“We’ve got a lot of guys out there that might be 30 years old that have been blown up a dozen times,” says Kevin Kit Parker, a biomedical engineer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is conducting research on TBI. “And the risk that these guys are going to get a disease like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s is soaring.”
The number of troops affected by this kind of silent TBI has already topped 200,000, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in Washington DC. A survey done by the Rand Corporation, a not-for-profit research firm in Santa Monica, California, suggests it could be as high as 320,000. The Pentagon and the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which are responsible for the health care of current and former troops, respectively, are getting worried about a potential epidemic of disability and dementia. The disorder also presents a major challenge for researchers.”
The full story is here.