The Cover up of the Gulf War Continues Unabated

Sarin Exposure affects Neuropsychological Functioning

The recent report from Researcher Toomey is no big surprise to veterans.  The Veterans of the gulf war could have told you that we are not functioning as we were before the war if you had listened to us 19 years ago!  While I appreciate this study one has to wonder the cost of the study and why this was not done 19 years ago and how to treat this alteration of mental functioning so we can have a better quality of life!

Motor speed and sustained attention a problem following sarin exposure.  I can still remember hearings on the hill in DC when they the DOD experts said that we would have had acute symptoms and that they would Leave No Stone Unturned just like they are telling our OIF veterans now!  The DOD probably had this data in unpublished studies but never offerred to share unpublished work! 

Again the key point here is 19 years ago we had these acute symptoms and they refused to acknowledge those symptoms or document the testing done in the Gulf War Registry exams that Toomey is documenting now.

I and other Gulf War Veterans remember the testing from the Gulf War Registry exams that showed the same type of results if they had ever gotten to publish the detail reviews like they should have in 1996.  Many of us walked out of  those tests feeling gee they know what is happenning because we knew we had failed those tests way back then!  Now we have progressed to the point that there are very good neuroimagining studies at UTSWMED that could show this damage but the VA cut the contract off! 

At 19 years, we wonder when will the VA and DOD do the right thing and connect sarin exposure to gulf war illness(Service Connection) and why the work at UTSWMed was stopped right after the Naval Seabees had been brought back after 10 years to be reevaluated by UTSWMED.  The Seabees were put through the whole slew of tests for 7 days.  They were the group that was to be used to get to the best diagnostic tests panel to be used for all other groups that would be used to validate the proposed best diagnostic tests.  That group would allow the testing to be narrowed down to at least 4 days instead of 7 full days. 

Then subsequent groups that had gone through the national phone survey would have been brought through the testing to document even by specific units ie Special Forces, 101st Airborne, 82nd, and on down the list that would show damage in each by unit and thus by location something that has not been done before in other studies!  Yet the contract and funding has been cut off by the VA.

Yet for the last 19 years, the Secretary of the VA has relied only on the IOM/NAS studies that failed the gulf war veterans and led to denial of connection to Sarin exposures.  The work DR Haley was doing is critical and could help document by unit actual neurological physiologic testing exposures and results.  It could have also illuminated the specific brain structures affected and pointed us in the right direction as far as potential treatment of these damaged neurological structures.  To put it in an anology it would have been the detail need as in an structural engineers mind where the damage on the bridge is so structural damage assessment and what specific potential repairs were needed and how that might be done thru a detailed analysis.  But again the funds were cut at a critical juncture again delaying progress for the gulf war veterans themselves!

Thus the case of a cover up continues, the trust of the gulf war veterans takes another dive, and again we wait.  Thus the reason that there should be full investigational hearings from JOINT Full Senate and House VA Committees.  Do we have no champions left on the hill in DC?  Where are the champions for the Gulf War Veterans of 1990-91?  Where is the acknowledgment of the truth?  Where is the accountability for leaving us in this state for 19 years?  Where is the medical community to stand up and say that psychological drugging of these veterans is not the answer! 

Where are the neurological exams that we should have been getting for 19 years instead of the turfing off to psychology.  This is brain damage like a concussion, brain cancer, parkinson’s, that should have resulted in more referrals to NEUROLOGY not PSYCHOLOGY!  Is this not medical malpractice or malfesance from missed diagnosed, erroneous diagnosing, or omitted diagnosing?  How much do we have to suffer before the truth is told!  WE did not have PTSD when we came home but what we have gone through for 19 years would now probably qualify for PTSD as a secondary diagnosis due to treatment given by our own government that we laid our lives on the line for in 1990-91!

Where is the implementation of rectifying a glaring error/cover up that has damaged at least one out of four gulf war veterans?

Thus we hand it over to another write up in a medical journal that follows:

Neuropsychological functioning of U.S. Gulf War veterans 10 years after the war – Source: Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Sep 2009
by Rosemary Toomy, et al.
August 27, 2009

Many U.S. Gulf War-era veterans complained of poor cognition following the war. This study assessed neuropsychological functioning in veterans 10 years after the war through objective tests.

2,189 Gulf War-era veterans (1,061 deployed, 1,128 non-deployed) were examined at 1 of 16 U.S. Veterans Affairs medical centers. Outcomes included neuropsychological domains derived from factor analysis and individual test scores.

Deployed veterans performed significantly worse than non-deployed veterans:

• On 2 of 8 factors (motor speed & sustained attention, analysis not corrected for multiple comparisons)

• And on 4 of 27 individual test variables (Trails A & B, California Verbal Learning Test-List B, and Continuous Performance Test sensitivity, with only Trails B surviving Bonferroni correction).

Within deployed veterans:

• Khamisiyah exposure [site where rockets were destroyed and the nerve agent Sarin, which is similar in mechanism of action and biological activity to some commonly used insecticides and medicines, was released into the air] was negatively correlated with motor speed after controlling for emotional distress. [More sarin exposure, slower motor speed.]

• Depressive symptoms and self-reported exposure to toxicants were independently and significantly associated with worse sustained attention.

• Other factors were also associated with self-reported exposures.

• The findings were not a result of differential effort across groups.

Gulf War deployment is associated with subtle declines of motor speed and sustained attention, despite overall intact neuropsychological functioning.

Evidence suggests that toxicant exposures influence both these functions, and depressive symptoms also influence attention.

Source: Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Sep 2009;15(5):717-29. PMID: 19640317, by Toomey R, Alpern R, Vasterling JJ, Baker DG, Reda DJ, Lyons MJ, Henderson WG, Kang HK, Eisen SA, Murphy FM. Research Service, Boston VA Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts, USA