TUESDAY, Feb. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Civil War veterans who witnessed significant trauma and those who were relatively young at the time were more likely to experience post-war heart, gastrointestinal and nervous diseases than other soldiers, according to an examination of medical records published in the February issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Judith Pizarro, M.A., from the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues conducted the study of 15,027 Civil War veterans because of the availability of post-war medical records and the ability to follow all subjects until death. The soldiers were separated by age and placed into quartiles based on the number of company members killed, which was used as an estimate of the amount of trauma the soldiers witnessed.
The investigators found that 38.8 percent experienced both mental and physical post-war conditions with the youngest group (age 9 to 17) 1.93 times more likely to be affected than the oldest (age 31 or older). Cardiac and gastrointestinal disease were 1.34 times more likely and physical and nervous diseases were 1.5 times as likely in veterans from companies with heavy casualties compared to other veterans.
The researchers also found a significant relationship between trauma exposure and early death but question whether these health effects are applicable to soldiers of modern wars. However, Roger K. Pitman, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, writes in an editorial that these results echo studies of Vietnam War veterans.
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