Health & Fitness - Combat and peacekeeping troops suffer PTSD

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Combat and peacekeeping troops suffer PTSD

LONDON, Ontario (UPI) -- Veterans' well-being is affected by post-traumatic stress disorder whether they are deployed as combat or peacekeeping troops, Canadian researchers said.

Dr. J. Donald Richardson of The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, and colleagues studied 125 male deployed Canadian Forces peacekeeping veterans who were referred for psychiatric assessment.

The average age of the men was 41, and they averaged 16 years of military service. The most common military theater in which they served was the Balkan states -- Bosnia, Croatia, the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo -- with 83 percent having exposure to combat or a war zone.

The study, published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, found anxiety disorders such as PTSD are associated with impaired emotional well-being, and this applies just as much to peacekeeping veterans as to combat veterans.

"This finding is important to clinicians working with the newer generation of veterans, as it stresses the importance of including measures of quality of life when evaluating veterans to better address their rehabilitation needs," Richardson said in a statement. "It is not enough to measure symptom changes with treatment; we need to objectively asses if treatment is improving their quality of life and how they are functioning in their community."

Copyright 2008 by United Press International

This news arrived on: 10/04/2008

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