Postwar Hospitalization Experience of Gulf War Veterans Participating in U.S. Health Registries

摘要

Although the US military experienced relatively low combat casualty rates during the Gulf War there has been concern that exposures occurring during the war may have resulted in postwar morbidity among Gulf War veterans. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) initiated clinical registries to provide systematic health evaluations for self- referred Gulf War veterans. As of September 1999, more than 100,000 of the nearly 700,000 Gulf War veterans had enrolled in one or both of the Gulf War health registries. The authors used Cox's proportional hazards modeling to investigate and identify the significant associations between registry participation and postwar hospitalization. These findings support the hypothesis that registry participants were more likely to have postwar morbidity than veterans who chose not to enroll in the health registries.