Doctors face rash of brain-damaged Veterans

[EV_Ares]

While working with a speech pathologist, Bryan Malone, an Army specialist from Haughton, La., exposes a scar left after a rocket attack on a Baghdad gym where he was working out.



BY THE NUMBERS

Most traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, are mild, and most symptoms disappear within a year or two. Estimates of symptoms troops have suffered: Symptom Right after injury After return to U.S.

Headache 88% 56%

Dizziness 64% 14%

Memory problems 20% 46%

Balance problems 28% 18%

Irritability 28% 50%
Source: Walter Reed Army Medical Center study.

By Marilynn Marchione, Associated Press
NASHVILLE — The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers.
Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science.

"I've been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they're saying to me, 'We're seeing things we've never seen before,"' said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University's brain injury rehabilitation program.

Doctors also are realizing that symptoms overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that both must be treated. Odd as it may seem, brain injury can protect against PTSD by blurring awareness of what happened.

But as memory improves, emotional problems can emerge: One of the first "graduates" of Vanderbilt's program committed suicide three weeks later.

"Of all the ones here, he would not have been the one we would have thought," Schneider said. "They called him the Michelangelo of Fort Campbell" — a guy who planned to go to art school.

(complete article @ link)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-09-09-braininjuries_N.htm

[Karenina]

1. "Support our troops."