UC research shows risk of ALS exposure in Gulf War veterans is ti...( CINCINNATIA new study led by researc...),Health

CINCINNATIA new study, led by researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC), says that cases of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) among soldiers who served in the first Persian Gulf War were caused by certain events during their deployment to the war zone, meaning the exposure and illness is not as widespread as previously thought.

The study is being published in the July issue of Neuroepidemiology.

Ronnie Horner, PhD, lead author of the study, along with colleagues at Duke University Medical Center found that among the 124 cases of ALS studied, 48 occurred within those soldiers deployed to the Persian Gulf region.

Horner says most of the deployed soldiers who developed ALS had disease onset in 1996 or earlier.

"The outbreak was time-limited," he continues. "We actually saw a declining risk after 1996; therefore, the risk is not continual. The pattern of disease onset suggests that whatever exposure occurred among these soldiers most likely happened sometime between August 1990 and July 1991, the period of the first Gulf War."

ALS is a fatal neurological disease caused by the degeneration of nerve cells in the central nervous system that control voluntary muscle movement. It is commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease after the baseball Hall of Famer who died of it in 1941.

Horner, director for the Institute for the Study of Health at UC, says it is an illness that usually affects people in their 60s and 70s.

"When it started occurring in veterans in their 30s and 40sa low-risk populationresearchers knew that something had occurred during that conflict to cause these affects."

The recent study builds on research published in 2003 that showed there was a two-fold increased risk of ALS among 1991 Gulf War veterans.

To gather this information, researchers screened medical files at Veteran Affairs and Department of Defense hospitals nationwide in search of patients with ALS or oth
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