Thursday, January 31, 2008

Battle Concussions Tied to Stress Disorder

The study, in The New England Journal of Medicine, is the military’s first large-scale effort to gauge the effect of mild head injuries — concussions, many of them from roadside blasts — that some experts worry may be causing a host of undiagnosed neurological deficiencies.

The new report found that soldiers who had concussions were more likely than those with other injuries to report a variety of physical and mental symptoms in their first months back home, including headaches, poor sleep and balance problems. But they were also at higher risk for the stress disorder, or PTSD, and that accounted for most of the difference in complaints, the researchers concluded. Symptoms of the disorder include irritability, sleep problems and flashbacks.

Experts cautioned that the study had not been designed to detect subtle changes in mental performance, like slips in concentration or short-term memory, that might have developed in the wake of a concussion and might be unrelated to stress reactions. Many returning veterans are still struggling with those problems, which can linger for months.

The findings are in line with previous research linking concussions to post-traumatic stress disorder that develops after frightening events outside a military context, like car accidents; concussions from athletic collisions rarely lead to the disorder.

READ MORE @ NY TIMES