. "Illnesses in Gulf War Veterans." Gulf War and Health: Volume 1. Depleted Uranium, Pyridostigmine Bromide, Sarin, and Vaccines. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2000.
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Gulf War and Health: Volume 1. Depleted Uranium, Sarin, Pyridostigmine Bromide, Vaccines
TABLE 2.1 Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Gulf War Troops
aThere were approximately 697,000 U.S. military personnel.
SOURCE: Joseph, 1997.
identical set of symptoms was reported most frequently among the approximately 20,000 participants in the DoD registry (CDC, 1999). Veterans classified in the DoD registry as having “signs, symptoms, and ill-defined conditions” most frequently complained of fatigue, headache, and memory loss (Roy et al., 1998). Clinicians were able to arrive at a primary diagnosis for about 82 percent of symptomatic DoD registry participants (Joseph, 1997) and for a similar fraction of VA registry participants (Murphy et al., 1999) (Table 2.2). A registry program established by the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence for U.K. Gulf War veterans found similar types and frequencies of symptoms and diagnoses (Coker et al., 1999). Across the registries, musculoskeletal diseases; mental disorders; and symptoms, signs, and ill-defined conditions5 were the three most
5
“Symptoms, signs, and ill-defined conditions” refers to International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Classical Modification (ICD-9-CM) codes 780–799, which are reserved for 160 subclassifications of ill-defined, common conditions not
