WEDNESDAY, Jan. 16 (HealthDay News) -- Among U.S. military personnel, the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder is three times higher in those who have seen combat in Afghanistan and Iraq than in other soldiers, according to research published online Jan. 15 in BMJ Online First.
Tyler C. Smith, of the Department of Defense Center for Deployment Health Research at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, and colleagues collected survey data on 50,184 service members before and after the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The researchers found that 24 percent of the service members were deployed for the first time to Afghanistan and Iraq. The investigators identified new-onset self-reported post-traumatic stress disorders or diagnosis in 7.6 percent to 8.7 percent of deployers who reported combat exposures, 1.4 percent to 2.1 percent of deployers who did not report combat exposures, and 2.3 percent to 3 percent of non-deployers.
"The risk of post-traumatic stress disorder conferred by combat exposure may not be preventable, but subsets of this population may exist who are even more vulnerable or, conversely, who retain a certain level of resilience to combat exposure," the authors write. "Future research should include efforts to better understand the resiliency and vulnerability to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder among subpopulations of combat deployers."
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