Helping vets in toughest battle

Helping vets in toughest battle

Since 1991, sound sleep has eluded gulf war veteran Charles Townsend.

“There’s no such thing as sleep to me,” said Townsend, an Army airborne sergeant who lives in Dallas. “I get angry every night, then I roll over and try to get back to sleep.”

Sleep that leaves thousands of veterans feeling as if they never rested is just one of the mysterious symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome. Now researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas are a step closer to understanding why some veterans are so sick. The research will be published in October’s American Journal of Medicine.

Damage to part of the nervous system that regulates automatic bodily functions might account for nearly half the symptoms — including gallbladder disease, depression, joint pain, chronic diarrhea and sexual dysfunction — that some veterans of the Persian Gulf War suffer, said Dr. Robert Haley, chief of epidemiology at the medical center.

“For years, veterans have said they feel bad, but they can’t really tell us why,” said Haley, who has closely monitored veterans of the war since 1995. “This helps explain why.”

Although the number of veterans with gulf war illnesses is not known, 330,000 have sought treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department for illnesses and injuries related to exposure to and conduct of wartime operations, said Steven Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center in Washington, D.C. About 220,000 are receiving compensation for their disabilities.

To understand why some veterans get sick, Haley studied a primitive portion of the nervous system that automatically regulates bodily function.

The sympathetic system, which controls the “fight or flight” instinct, usually comes on in the morning; the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates digestion and sleep, switches on at night.

“At night, digestion gets completed, the intestines rest; everything rests,” Haley said. “If that doesn’t engage at night, the body doesn’t go to the rest phase and the next day the person feels terrible.”

When Haley and his colleagues studied 40 members of a Naval Reserve construction battalion, they found that parasympathetic activity increased at night in the healthy veterans but not in the sick ones.

“The body didn’t heal itself at night,” he said.

For the study, Haley monitored changes in the veterans’ heartbeats over 24 hours and measured changes in high-frequency heart-rate variability, a function regulated by the parasympathetic nervous system.

The high-frequency heart-rate variability normally more than doubles at night, Haley said. But with the sick veterans, it stayed down.

Low-level exposure to sarin gas, a nerve agent released when U.S. forces detonated Iraqi chemical stores during the gulf war, has been linked to veterans’ illnesses in previous studies. In their research, Haley and his colleagues have shown that veterans with Gulf War Syndrome were born with lower levels of a protective blood enzyme that fights off the toxic substances found in sarin.

Haley’s research is important to veterans who are already sick but also benefits others, Robinson said.

“It’s absolutely necessary and important that scientists try to understand what happened to the gulf war veterans,” he said. “By Dr. Haley doing this work, it opens the door for other scientists and researchers to further explore what happens when a human is exposed to chemical warfare.”

For Townsend, there’s little doubt that his symptoms are connected to his exposure to sarin. His symptoms, including personality changes, developed when he returned to the United States. He’s learned to live with them but says it’s difficult because so few people understand the disease.

“It’s like being a dog that’s been hit on the highway, but everybody just drives by,” he said. “That’s my life.”