News & Headlines

For 50 years after World War II, Wilbur Jackson “Jack” Myers said he couldn’t talk about his experiences in Europe. He was dealing with post-traumatic stress — a term that originated decades after the war.

Stress isn’t usually a good thing for mental health. But during exercise it can be.

Congress finalized a bill Friday that orders the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary to launch a five-year pilot program that provides service dog training to benefit veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Scientists are becoming more and more concerned with the emergence of a syndrome termed “long COVID”, where a significant percentage of sufferers of COVID-19 experience long-lasting symptoms.

At 4 a.m., they came to take Helen Maroulis’s blood. She was angry. She was confused. Only two years before she had won a gold medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, defeating the world’s most formidable 53-kilogram female wrestle. But by the summer of 2018, she was in a psychiatric treatment center somewhere in Utah. Post-traumatic stress disorder, they said. From concussions. From wrestling, the thing she loved the most. 

While debates in rugby rage about what equals a red card and what a suitable stand down following brain injury might be, science continues to bleed unnerving evidence into the mix that none of the above is relevant. If heightened risk of neurodegenerative conditions in later life is the greatest threat to the sport’s survival, which it is, one-off events are of at best marginal significance.

In a new study, researchers comparing three treatments for Veterans with PTSD found that the longer the time period between trauma and treatment, the greater the decline in symptoms.

“Their symptoms are unlikely to subside without treatment,” Dr. Sheila Rauch says. “All of the Veterans in the study showed reductions and benefit. It means that they do not have to worry if they have been suffering a long time with PTSD because treatments do work regardless of how long it has been.”

Nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military. Why has it been so difficult to change the culture?

Women service members are expanding their service in the military. Since the Defense Department opened all military roles to all service members in 2016, there have been many female “firsts” across military forces. As the population of women veterans grows, we learn more about the visible and invisible wounds these women experience from their time in service, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Marvel Entertainment has partnered with Wounded Warrior Project for the latest round of episodes in the Marvel Make Me a Hero digital series, and the first one features Marine veteran Miki Padgett.

The Army’s special operations community has borne the brunt of twenty years of war, training and deploying at what a then-senior commander called an “unsustainable” pace. 

As the United States draws troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, a source of injury and death will cease. But research by the Veterans Health Administration will continue. The chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System, Dr. Ann McKee returned to Federal Drive with Tom Temin for an update.