THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 9, 1997 TAG: 9701090353
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SHANKAR VEDANTAM AND MICHAEL E. RUANE, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS
SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 68 lines
The fatigue, nausea and other symptoms afflicting some Persian Gulf War veterans may have been caused by pet flea collars worn by some soldiers, pesticides, chemical nerve agents and pills taken to protect against nerve gas.
The chemicals, or mixtures of them, caused subtle, delayed damage to the brains and nervous systems of some gulf war veterans, researchers at the University of Texas said.
That conclusion was announced Wednesday. If confirmed through further research, it would represent a breakthrough in a years-long search for causes of an array of veterans' medical complaints lumped under the label Gulf War Syndrome.
However, many experts who have studied Gulf War Syndrome were skeptical about the study's conclusions and warned that they might lead nowhere - as have other hypotheses.
Even if correct in its conclusions, the study does not offer a way for doctors to diagnose a veteran who walks into a clinic with the syndrome - and therefore does not point the way to a specific ``cure.''
On Tuesday, a White House panel concluded a two-year investigation of the Gulf War Syndrome by saying no plausible explanation for the veterans' complaints had been found other than the stress of wartime service. The committee explicitly ruled out exposure to environmental toxins in the gulf war as a possible cause.
``The studies would not have changed anything in our final report,'' said Gary Caruso, a spokesman for the President's Advisory Committee. He said a review of the Texas studies by Dr. Joyce Lashof, the committee chair, concluded that the new research did not sway the bulk of the evidence, which still pointed to no connection between gulf war chemicals and veterans' illnesses.
Still, gulf veterans' groups and other activists argue that exposure to chemicals during the war may have caused the symptoms, and President Clinton ordered the study group to oversee a continuing search for causes of the veterans' complaints.
The Texas scientists theorize that the veterans are suffering from a rare disorder called organophosphate-induced delayed polyneuropathy, which is caused by exposure to chemicals that block an enzyme important to the functioning of the human nervous system.
The researchers said sophisticated neurological tests given to a group of veterans with symptoms who had been exposed to insecticides and other chemicals in the gulf showed that they ``leaned toward abnormality.'' Up to a quarter of the 697,000 gulf war veterans may have been affected by combinations of these chemicals.
Even without a cure, the possibility that there may be a real neurological cause of the gulf syndrome could be good news to veterans, some of whom have felt their complaints have been ignored or dismissed as simple stress.
``This will give a lot of veterans heart,'' said Robert W. Haley, a scientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and the lead scientist on the study. ``There is nothing more demoralizing than for a veteran to go to a doctor who can't diagnose the problem and says, it's all in your head.''
Haley and his colleagues said they found three major variants of the Gulf War Syndrome in their study of 249 members of the 24th Naval Reserve Construction Battalion, a reserve unit of Navy Seabees who served in the Gulf War. Many of those in the study suffered some symptoms.
Haley said that even after the groups with the three variants were identified, neurologists failed to diagnose veterans with any specific illness.
KEYWORDS: GULF WAR GULF WAR ILLNESS GULF WAR SICKNESS STUDY