Rucksack of health risks: Military souvenirs no one wants

Physicians need to be alert to the unique problems that soldiers returning from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan might bring back.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. March 21, 2005.

The hundreds of thousands of soldiers who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan live a daily existence marked by hazard. When they make their return home, it seems they finally could be out of harm's way. But the health issues they face related to their military service can run deep and might not appear until long after they are back living their civilian lives.

They could bring home infectious diseases rarely seen in the United States. Their lungs might have been damaged by the desert's dusty environment. Their time at battle could trigger anxiety or depression -- with 8% to 15% of such cases developing into full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder.

"Deployments in general are challenging for soldiers," said Brian Bacak, MD, who was in Afghanistan for three months in the fall of 2002 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. He is now assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. "When soldiers get back, they're relearning how to function in regular society, and there are some problems that are unique to that population."

Good population-based data on the health of the most recent generation of veterans is lacking. And in many cases, soldiers such as Dr. Bacak come home without any deployment-related issues that require medical intervention. Still, this experience is not always the case -- which creates challenges for many primary care physicians.

One of the main reasons is that this generation of veterans is far more likely to receive care from civilian primary care physicians than from military or Veterans Health Administration medical facilities.