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The new PTSD Is Here, and It's Worse

Soldiers feel its effects after many years

Apr 28, 2009 13:37 GMT  ·  By
Coalition soldiers stationed on the rough battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer a number of medical conditions associated with their combat experiences
   Coalition soldiers stationed on the rough battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer a number of medical conditions associated with their combat experiences

The Post-Concussion Syndrome (PCS) is a relatively new medical condition, with effects that have not yet been fully assessed. There is currently a complex debate going on in the international scientific community, on whether this is a new disease, or if it's just an alternate version to the more common post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has been around since the First World War, but has changed names a lot of times since. According to Coalition soldiers who return from Afghanistan and Iraq, the symptoms are very persistent and can return months to years after the combatants are wounded in the line of duty, NewScientist reports.

Among the most commonly identified symptoms associated with PCS, doctors include the memory loss, dizziness, nausea, headaches, the disturbance of sleep, unexplained pains, the inability to concentrate and emotional problems, which persist for a long time. At this point, aware of the growing problem, the government and the Army Department of the United States are investing millions of dollars into research on the matter, hoping to identify the main triggers of this debilitating and persistent condition.

Thus far, the main culprits have been identified as being the bomb shock waves. When an explosive charge blows up, there are three things that can kill a soldier – the blast itself, the wounds from the shrapnel, and the shock waves generated in the immediate vicinity. If combatants escape the first two, there's a good chance that the third will cause either PTSD or PCS. When they hit a human body, shock waves can easily rupture air-filled organs, such as the lungs, ear drums and bowels, and can cause others to stretch.

But the effects that they have on the brain cannot be determined as easily, simply because the after-effects could be of a “software” nature, and not necessarily on the “hardware” itself. This means that, while on the surface the brain may look intact, several areas could get adversely affected and knocked off their usual operation parameters by a strong explosion. This would explain a large number of the symptoms associated with the two medical conditions, but it still provides no clues as to how to treat the issue. Usually, for experts to be able to fix something in the human body, they first have to know what's going wrong.