How Can I Show My Headaches Are Cause By Military Service?

Ground forces Spec. David Hunt says migraines have curbed his military career. (U.S. Ground forces)

Army Spec. David Hunt fabricated it through a year of deployment in central Iraq largely unscathed. Merely two years after returning to the United States, he faces medical retirement from the military.

As Hunt, 37, describes information technology, there'southward "really not any place" for him in the Army because of chronic migraine, the condition that has plagued him e'er since an off-duty car accident in 2006.

He has fought the symptoms — nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light — through deployments to the Arizona-Mexico border too every bit Iraq. He recalls 1 particularly bad migraine hit while he was alone and on guard in Arizona, and he vomited while seeking shelter from the harsh lord's day. "I did everything I could to just sit upward and keep picket," he said.

Chase isn't alone in his struggle. Over the past decade, migraine and headache have go a meaning trouble for U.South. armed forces. A 2008 Defense Department study said diagnoses of migraine increased across all branches of the military between 2001 and 2007. Another, more than contempo study found that, among near one,000 soldiers evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan because of some class of headache between 2004 and 2009, two-thirds did not render to duty. "Headaches represent a significant cause of unit attrition in personnel deployed in military operations," the study concluded.

The stress and physical demands of serving in combat areas tin trigger caput pains, according to experts. Researchers have also institute that concussions and caput traumas increase the likelihood that service members will develop debilitating headaches and migraines afterward deployment.

Growing recognition has positioned headache and migraine among such issues as post-traumatic stress disorder as a military machine health concern, and the Defense Department is funding millions of dollars in research. Scientists are now evaluating new treatments and therapies that could benefit not only military personnel simply also civilians — the estimated half-dozen percent of men and 18 percent of women who take at least 1 migraine a twelvemonth.

After tours of duty, previously symptom-free men and women are much more likely to experience migraine. A 2009 written report of more than 1.2 million U.S. participants in the Iraqi and Afghan military machine deportment institute the number who received a diagnosis of migraine increased 40 per centum after a bout of duty.

The mail-deployment diagnosis was peculiarly mutual among those troops who had experienced concussion, anxiety or low. Ten percent of men and xx pct of women who had a concussion later on got their offset migraine diagnosis.

More six percentage of men and more than 16 percent of women who had a history of anxiety or depression while in the war zone then developed migraine.

Continuing issues

Anxiety and depression go along to be problems post-deployment and are frequently linked to migraine symptoms, as is mail service-traumatic stress disorder. Together, these bug dramatically reduce the quality of life: According to Lt. Col. Jay Erickson, a md at the Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., one in three service members with migraine is moderately or severely disabled by the condition post-deployment, equally adamant by the widely used Migraine Disability Assessment exam.

As is true in the general population, frequency of migraine can vary widely, said Erickson, who treats many soldiers for neurological issues. "Some have only one migraine every three to six months, whereas others have a migraine on a nearly daily basis," he said. "On average, withal, nosotros detect they have three to five migraines per calendar month."

That rate is similar to what's seen among civilians, as is the pain level and duration of the attacks. In that location is a substantial difference, however, amongst those troops known to take suffered head trauma. Affected soldiers who have had concussions have "much more frequent attacks," Erickson said.

Ann Scher, a headache researcher at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, has been closely following near 400 service members who returned to Colorado'southward Fort Carson from Iraq and Afghanistan. Early data bear witness that 30 percent of those who experienced a balmy traumatic encephalon injury (TBI), which includes concussion, experience migraine; adding in probable migraine or migrainelike headache, the rate goes up to 54 percent.

In addition, Scher has found that service members who experienced mild TBI tend to accept a continuous, depression-course headache punctuated by episodes of migraine. Some also feel unusually long-lasting aura — a symptom of migraine that includes disturbance of vision.

Handling and research

Treatments for people with post-traumatic headache and migraine are the same as for patients who have not served in state of war zones: nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which restrict blood flow; triptans, a newer class of drugs that act on nerve receptors; and various forms of cognitive therapy to prevent or relieve symptoms.

Few truly novel medications and treatments for any kind of headache or migraine have made it to market in the past decade, only the inquiry pipeline has picked up in recent years.

Interest from the military "has helped migraine gain traction," said David Dodick, a headache researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. Since 2007, four Defense Department projects specific to post-traumatic headache and migraine treatment have received $2.four million in congressional funds.

That adds on to approximately $19 million a yr in migraine and headache inquiry funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to Robert Shapiro, a researcher and president of the Brotherhood for Headache Disorders Advocacy.

"I give the DOD credit for first to take initiative," Shapiro said, adding that the military's involvement is "changing the perception of this valid neurological disorder" and making the need for new treatments a higher priority.

Among the DOD projects is i by Erickson, who is performing a randomized clinical trial to compare three medications and a placebo in service members with chronic post-traumatic headache.

"The three nosotros're testing are medications that are commonly used to treat [traditional] migraine and headache, and so we think that there's a good possibility that these will be effective for treating post-concussive headaches," Erickson said.

In some other project, Yu-Qing Cao of Washington University in St. Louis has been researching the function of cytokines, a kind of protein that can promote inflamation. If, as Cao hypothesizes, the cytokines contribute to and/or maintain migraine, anti-cytokine therapies could be used to alleviate the pain, particularly among chronic sufferers. Cao said she is already seeing positive results in mice.

The new federal projection with the virtually funding — more than $1 one thousand thousand — is being run by Andrew Charles, director of the Headache Inquiry and Treatment Program at UCLA, and Peter Goadsby, director of the Headache Center at the University of California at San Francisco. The two are examining the role of neurochemical signals in migraine and will evaluate three usually used medications — none currently used for migraine — that affect signaling pathways.

The piece of work is in its early on stages, Charles said, adding that "it's hard" to discover funding for research, and "the war machine is rightly starting to recognize what a substantial problem [headache and migraine] is for service men and women" by making this kind of investment.

Military research has the potential to get beyond helping service members. Researchers agreed that while the differences between post-traumatic migraine and traditional migraine are not yet fully understood, successful treatments for one might be constructive in both. Charles as well said that "new treatments could work not just for migraine but other headaches, in lower doses."

Varying effectiveness

The effectiveness of treatments, even so, varies widely. Army Spec. Hunt, for case, had to get through several medications earlier finding one that worked for him: propranolol, which has left him almost migraine-free for three months.

Notwithstanding, he remains frustrated. "They stopped my career," he said of his migraines. Medication was able to sustain Hunt through his missions in Arizona and Republic of iraq, but the migraines affected his performance enough for others to have notice, and when he returned to the United States, he was removed from his unit for medical reasons.

Hunt has since spent his time at Fort Lewis in Washington land in a transitional battalion where soldiers get intendance for their medical conditions and brand plans for the next step in their lives. He has decided to pursue medical retirement. No combat-related specialties will take a soldier with his condition, Chase said, and he would probably have to work in assistants or something similar instead.

Migraine is "headache times 10," Hunt said. "It'south really difficult to handle that while shooting, moving and communicating."

How Can I Show My Headaches Are Cause By Military Service?,

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/migraine-and-headaches-prompt-new-research-focused-on-military-personnel/2011/10/24/gIQAlS0RvM_story.html

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