News-Info-Alerts

Re: POW Medical Studies

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: August 08, 2002

"POWs Don't Suffer More Depression, Mental Damage

By Charnicia E. Huggins

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The effects of a traumatic prisoner of war (POW) experience on the brain may not be as dramatic as some might predict, according to a team of naval health researchers.


"To a certain extent people are stronger, hardier, and more resilient than we have necessarily come to think in recent years," study author Dr. Jeffrey Moore of the Naval Operational Medicine Institute in Pensacola, Florida told Reuters Health.

Previous researchers have observed various mental deficits among prisoners of war after they have returned to the United States. Other researchers, however, have not been able to support this finding in subsequent studies.

To investigate, Moore and his colleagues compared the mental abilities and depression rates of 138 naval aviator North Vietnam POWs released in 1973 with 138 naval aviators who had not been prisoners of war.

Overall, despite the lengthy solitary confinement and torture the POWs experienced, they scored similarly to their peers on most tests of their mental abilities, the investigators report in the August 7th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association ( news - web sites). In some cases, POWs even outperformed their peers.

Further, depression was as common among the POWs as it was among the comparison group.

"In many cases, we can't distinguish between the groups," Moore said.

These findings may also extend to individuals who have suffered other types of trauma, including the September 11th terror attacks, according to the researcher.

"Certainly in the post September 11th days, we hear a lot about the negative effects of trauma...and there are plenty of them, unfortunately sometimes the message that gets out is that those negative effects are somehow unavoidable or ubiquitous," Moore said. "That's not necessarily true.

"It's certainly possible for people to come through an extensive trauma and not be distinguishable from an appropriate comparison group," he said.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association 2002;288:574-575

© 2002 Reuters Limited"