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The New York Times Magazine published an article yesterday that asks exactly that question:
In early 2012, a neuropathologist named Daniel Perl was examining a slide of human brain tissue when he saw something odd and unfamiliar in the wormlike squiggles and folds. It looked like brown dust; a distinctive pattern of tiny scars. Perl was intrigued. At 69, he had examined 20,000 brains over a four-decade career, focusing mostly on Alzheimer's and other degenerative disorders. He had peered through his microscope at countless malformed proteins and twisted axons. He knew as much about the biology of brain disease as just about anyone on earth. But he had never seen anything like this.
The brain under Perl's microscope belonged to an American soldier who had been five feet away when a suicide bomber detonated his belt of explosives in 2009. The soldier survived the blast, thanks to his body armor, but died two years later of an apparent drug overdose after suffering symptoms that have become the hallmark of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: memory loss, cognitive problems, inability to sleep and profound, often suicidal depression. Nearly 350,000 service members have been given a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury over the past 15 years, many of them from blast exposure. The real number is likely to be much higher, because so many who have enlisted are too proud to report a wound that remains invisible.
[Continues...]
The article went on:
Perl and his lab colleagues recognized that the injury that they were looking at was nothing like concussion. The hallmark of C.T.E. (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) is an abnormal protein called tau, which builds up, usually over years, throughout the cerebral cortex but especially in the temporal lobes, visible across the stained tissue like brown mold. What they found in these traumatic-brain-injury cases was totally different: a dustlike scarring, often at the border between gray matter (where synapses reside) and the white matter that interconnects it. Over the following months, Perl and his team examined several more brains of service members who died well after their blast exposure, including a highly decorated Special Operations Forces soldier who committed suicide. All of them had the same pattern of scarring in the same places, which appeared to correspond to the brain's centers for sleep, cognition and other classic brain-injury trouble spots.
Then came an even more surprising discovery. They examined the brains of two veterans who died just days after their blast exposure and found embryonic versions of the same injury, in the same areas, and the development of the injuries seemed to match the time elapsed since the blast event. Perl and his team then compared the damaged brains with those of people who suffered ordinary concussions and others who had drug addictions (which can also cause visible brain changes) and a final group with no injuries at all. No one in these post-mortem control groups had the brown-dust pattern.
Related to this coverage, NPR broadcast a story yesterday that describes how the Pentagon has grudgingly accepted these facts and has changed its approach to personnel who suffer blast injuries.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 12 2016, @11:46AM
I'll second that. Blast damage is blast damage, and is clearly physical. PTSD has been attributed to victims of myriad insults and assaults, including physical abuse as a child, rape, close encounters with inimical wildlife - you name it, and if there are lingering effects, it's being labeled as PTSD. It has become a catch-all diagnosis, losing meaning as time goes on. "Battle fatigue" serves as well as PTSD does, to describe war weary warriors who have been subjected to to much stress and abuse. Let the shrinks have their PTSD to describe phsical, mental, and emotional trauma of civilians from various causes.
All that said - it behooves us to gain a better understanding of both battle fatigue, and blast trauma.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2016, @11:59AM
IIRC "battle fatigue" stopped being used because people had symptoms after the battle was over. "Shell shock" stopped being used since it occurred in people that weren't shelled and it wasn't related to the medical definition of "shock".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 13 2016, @12:25PM
I believe that you recall correctly. And, PTSD is going the same route.
As bad as all other trauma is - and in fact, some other trauma might be worse than combat - other trauma is not combat. Every time one set of researchers or another begins to think that they have some kind of handle on combat trauma - physical, psychological, mental, spiritual, or whatever, then civilians jump on board screaming "ME TOO! ME TOO!"
Which points up the fact that war wounds might be "sexy". Everyone wants what the combat soldier has because it is "sexy". Being brutally raped isn't "sexy", and few people want to admit to it - male or female.
But, the best thing the victims of each and every sort of trauma can possibly do for themselves, is to avoid being classified as something they are not.
If a bunch of foolish doctors are trying to treat the victim of a brutal rape the same as they would treat a combat veteran, they are doing their patient a grave disservice. Ditto for a child who was psychologically abused for the first 5, 10, 15 years of his life. He needs help, but he most certainly doesn't need the same help that the combat veteran needs. FFS, you don't WANT either of those victims to take on the mindset of a combat veteran!