![]() Rayhan, the principal author of the new study. The research makes clear that "Gulf War illness is real," said Rakib U. Two other studies released by Georgetown this year have also pointed to neurological damage in the brains of veterans reporting symptoms of Gulf War illness, including one that showed abnormalities in the nerve cells linking parts of the brain involved in processing feelings of pain and fatigue. The authors said, however, that the findings, along with other recent research, may offer clues in developing treatments and diagnostic tests for the illness, which currently is diagnosed through self-reported symptoms and has no definitive treatment. It also found different patterns of damage in two groups of veterans, indicating that the disease - if it is indeed a single ailment - takes different paths in different individuals. ![]() Their study, published by the online medical journal PLoS One on Friday, does not attempt to explain the causes of the damage. Such damage was not evident in the control group, which included nonveterans and healthy veterans.Such neurological damage, the researchers theorize, caused the veterans to be more sensitive to pain, to feel easily fatigued and to experience loss of short-term "working memory," all symptoms associated with Gulf War illness. Using magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of Gulf War veterans before and after exercise, the researchers discovered evidence of damage in parts of the veterans' brains associated with heart rate and pain. In the latest example, researchers at Georgetown University say they have found neurological damage in Gulf War veterans reporting symptoms of the disease. In some medical circles, the symptoms were thought to be psychological, the result of combat stress.īut recent research is bolstering the view that the symptoms, known collectively as Gulf War illness, are fundamentally biological in nature. In the two decades since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, medical researchers have struggled to explain a mysterious amalgam of problems in thousands of Gulf War veterans, including joint pain, physical malaise and gastrointestinal disorders.
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