Army Scans Brains For War Wounds

Brain In The News

Army to Use Scans to Find Bomb Injuries

<< Back to indexAugust 25, 2007
By Daniel G. Amen M.D.   

Recently, I taught a brain-imaging continuing education seminar for physicians. One of those in attendance was an Army doctor from Fort Lewis in Washington state. He commented on the large number of brain-injured returning Iraq war vets. According to him, while the soldiers’ protective equipment is doing a good job of saving lives, the concussive injuries from the roadside bombs are causing severe trauma to the brain.
Now, the Army is beginning to embrace the same SPECT brain-imaging technology we use to help detect these wounds, many of which would have gone previously unseen or misdiagnosed in days past. Here’s a recent related story from the Associated Press…

Army to Use Scans to Find Bomb Injuries
By ROBERT WELLER
The Associated Press
FORT CARSON, Colo. -- The Army, faced with thousands of cases of brain injury from the Iraq war, will soon begin testing brain scanning equipment in hopes of finding a more accurate way to identify hard-to-diagnose wounds, the commander of the post hospital on this Colorado base said Monday.
To date, the Army has not extensively used neuroimaging equipment to detect brain injuries in returning soldiers because not enough testing has been done to judge the technology's effectiveness.
But Fort Carson will soon test a brain scan procedure that uses gamma rays along with radioisotopes, said Col. John Cho, commander of the Evans Army Community Hospital at Fort Carson. The tests will be conducted on Fort Carson units returning from Iraq, he said.
The move comes as an interagency task force, headed by Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, released a report Monday saying injured soldiers and veterans will get more screenings for brain injury.
It also comes after a recent study at Fort Collins found that 18 percent of troops who had been to Iraq - 2,392 of 13,400 - suffered at least some brain damage from the blasts of improvised explosive devices.
Currently, doctors often must rely on questioning soldiers to determine if they've suffered brain damage in battle. Cho said that isn't good enough; many injured show no symptoms, while other symptoms can mirror other conditions. "How do you determine that someone has actually has a traumatic brain injury other than asking the soldier?" Cho said in an interview Monday.
Such verbal tests are subject to failure for many reasons: the soldier may not remember, may deliberately withhold information to avoid being discharged, or may not yet be feeling the effects of injury.
Stephen Robinson of Veterans for America, an organization that has accused the Army of discharging soldiers with brain damage while determining they have personality disorders, was pleased with the announcement. "After two years of us complaining, they are going to do something," Robinson said.
Lt. Col. Reed Smith, head of nuclear medicine at the Evans hospital, said his staff will be receiving a new scanning camera known as a SPECT (single photo emission computerized tomography) within two weeks.
Fort Carson will use soldiers who have already been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury to test the technology and rate its effectiveness, Cho said. Results will be delivered to an Army review board.
"We feel that we that we can move forward on behalf of the Army and for soldiers faster than other places," Cho said. "Hopefully it will identify a marker that can help diagnose brain damage."
"Obviously this is potentially a very positive thing. They are taking head injuries seriously. They are looking for a technology that will detect it," said Dr. P. Stephen Macedo, a Washington, D.C.-based neurologist and former doctor with the Veterans Administration

I’m grateful to see that we’re using this technology to help our returning vets. My hope is that accurate diagnosis and effective treatment will help lessen the pain for those who’ve already sacrificed so much.
To Your Brain Health,
Daniel
Daniel Amen, M.D.
CEO, Amen Clinics, Inc.
Distinguished Fellow, American Psychiatric Association

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Sand Creek Massacre Finally Memorialized April 2007

 SAND CREEK MASSACRE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, Colo. - More than 142 years after a band of state militia volunteers massacred 150 sleeping Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in a misdirected act of vengeance, a memorial to the tragic event was officially dedicated Saturday.

 The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic site, located 160 miles southeast of Denver on Big Sandy Creek in Kiowa County, pays tribute to those killed in the shameful Nov. 29, 1864, attack.

 Seeking revenge for the killings of several settlers by Indians, 700 militia members slaughtered nearly everyone in the village. Most were women or children.

 Descendants of some of the victims were among several hundred people at Saturday's dedication on the rolling hills of the southeastern Colorado plains. The crowd gathered a few hundred feet from a stand of cottonwood trees along the creek that historians believe marks the site of the killings.

 After a prayer and a blessing for the troops in
 Iraq, members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes chanted and played drums.

 "It's a site of shame, but it's finally being memorialized properly," said David Halaas, a former state historian.

 Eyewitness accounts of the attack include a letter from Lt. Joseph Cranmer: "A squaw ripped open and a child taken from her. Little children shot while begging for their lives."

 Tribe descendants claim they can still hear the children cry when they visit the site.

 "If there were any savages that day, it was not the Indian people," said former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe.

 Campbell, who sponsored the legislation making the spot a national historic site, said he slept beside the creek Friday night "to get a picture" of what the people saw before the attack.

 "I think it is the greatest testimony of the strength of a nation — that you are big enough and strong enough to acknowledge the cruelties and injuries of the past," said Patricia Limerick, chairwoman of the University of Colorado's Center of the American West and author of "Legacy of Conquest."

 The attack was recognized almost immediately as criminal. Congress condemned it and President Lincoln fired territorial Gov. John Evans.

 Witnesses told a congressional hearing that the victims were not hostile. Indian trader John S. Smith testified that the militia's leader, Col. John Chivington, knew the band at Sand Creek was peaceful and was not involved in the attacks on settlers.

 But Chivington, a Methodist minister known as "the fighting parson," was feted by Denver residents as a hero after the raid. They were terrified that the Confederacy would use Indians as their surrogates to wage war on them.

 "Among the brilliant feats of arms in Indian warfare, the recent campaign of our Colorado volunteers will stand in history with few rivals, and none to exceed it in final results," read an editorial in the Rocky Mountain News at the time.

 A Civil War memorial installed at the Colorado Capitol in 1909 listed Sand Creek as a great Union victory. But a plaque was added in 2002 giving details of the massacre to set the record straight.

 The Indians were camped at a site assigned to them by the Army. When the attack started, Southern Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle hurriedly hoisted a U.S. flag above his lodge, but to no avail. Black Kettle survived but was killed in an attack at Washita, Okla., in 1868 by soldiers led by Col. George Armstrong Custer.

 Since some of the victims of the attack were of mixed blood — the descendants of Indians and white fur traders — whites today also have a reason to revere the memorial, said Limerick.

 "There may be stories of equal anguish in our history but this is right up at the top. In a strange way, it is a basis for national pride," she said.