The Occurrence of Veterans with PTSD and Dementia
Veterans are dealing with health issues (Musculoskeletal injuries and pain, Mental health issues, Chemical exposure, Infectious diseases, Noise and vibration exposure, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Urologic injuries) upon returning home from combat duty. Also, many veterans have problem assimilating, flashbacks or just talking to civilians in general. The purpose of this paper is to look at the research surrounding veterans with PTSD link to Dementia. First of all, what is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an anxiety disorder that develops when someone is a witness to or experiences a traumatic event. PTSD has specific symptoms resulting from traumatic life threatening …show more content…
Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the prevalence of PTSD has been estimated at 17%, Vietnam veterans had an incidence of 20-30% incident of combat-related PTSD. There was a reference about older World War II and Koreans veterans with 12% PTSD, 45 years after combat. Many studies have been done prior to this article discussing the higher incidence of PTSD and health care issues in young and middle aged veterans. However, not much research had been done concerning the risk of dementia prior to their study. The objective of their study was to discover whether or not PTSD is linked to the risk of veterans developing dementia Dr. Yaffe and Associates did a cohort study using the Department of Veterans Affairs National Patient Care Database. The records were collected for patients who ranged from 55 to 100 years old, but had no dementia diagnosis between 1997 through 2000. Originally, over three million veterans who were served by the Veteran Administration, there were 170,378 participants excluded due to a diagnosis of dementia. The study consisted of 181,093 whom were 55 years and older, but without dementia from 1997 through 2000. The breakdown of the participants was 53, 155 with PTSD and 127, 938 without …show more content…
Those with PTSD tended to be younger. Also, they had more involved issues such as substance abuse, tobacco use, head injury and major clinical depression. There was a 7-year cumulative incidence rate of 10.6% with dementia. Whereas, the veterans without PTSD had a 6.6% incident dementia rate. In the follow up study, the incidence dementia rate was consistently higher in patients with PTSD.
Table 2: “Association Between PTSD and Risk of Dementia in Multivariable-Adjusted Models” showed that veterans with PTSD had double the chance getting incident dementia than those without PTSD. After adjustments were made for medical comorbidities and other neuropsychiatric diagnoses, decreased the strength of the association between PTSD and dementia. Table 3: “Association Between PTSD and Risk of Subtypes of Dementia” revealed that unadjusted HR ranged from 1.94 to 3.13. While the multivariable-adjusted HR ranged from 1.71 to 2.19. However, the only other consistent pattern was that PTSD was linked to a higher risk of dementia among all the dementia
Veterans are dealing with health issues (Musculoskeletal injuries and pain, Mental health issues, Chemical exposure, Infectious diseases, Noise and vibration exposure, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Urologic injuries) upon returning home from combat duty. Also, many veterans have problem assimilating, flashbacks or just talking to civilians in general. The purpose of this paper is to look at the research surrounding veterans with PTSD link to Dementia. First of all, what is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an anxiety disorder that develops when someone is a witness to or experiences a traumatic event. PTSD has specific symptoms resulting from traumatic life threatening …show more content…
Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the prevalence of PTSD has been estimated at 17%, Vietnam veterans had an incidence of 20-30% incident of combat-related PTSD. There was a reference about older World War II and Koreans veterans with 12% PTSD, 45 years after combat. Many studies have been done prior to this article discussing the higher incidence of PTSD and health care issues in young and middle aged veterans. However, not much research had been done concerning the risk of dementia prior to their study. The objective of their study was to discover whether or not PTSD is linked to the risk of veterans developing dementia Dr. Yaffe and Associates did a cohort study using the Department of Veterans Affairs National Patient Care Database. The records were collected for patients who ranged from 55 to 100 years old, but had no dementia diagnosis between 1997 through 2000. Originally, over three million veterans who were served by the Veteran Administration, there were 170,378 participants excluded due to a diagnosis of dementia. The study consisted of 181,093 whom were 55 years and older, but without dementia from 1997 through 2000. The breakdown of the participants was 53, 155 with PTSD and 127, 938 without …show more content…
Those with PTSD tended to be younger. Also, they had more involved issues such as substance abuse, tobacco use, head injury and major clinical depression. There was a 7-year cumulative incidence rate of 10.6% with dementia. Whereas, the veterans without PTSD had a 6.6% incident dementia rate. In the follow up study, the incidence dementia rate was consistently higher in patients with PTSD.
Table 2: “Association Between PTSD and Risk of Dementia in Multivariable-Adjusted Models” showed that veterans with PTSD had double the chance getting incident dementia than those without PTSD. After adjustments were made for medical comorbidities and other neuropsychiatric diagnoses, decreased the strength of the association between PTSD and dementia. Table 3: “Association Between PTSD and Risk of Subtypes of Dementia” revealed that unadjusted HR ranged from 1.94 to 3.13. While the multivariable-adjusted HR ranged from 1.71 to 2.19. However, the only other consistent pattern was that PTSD was linked to a higher risk of dementia among all the dementia