Assessment of Technical Issues Raised in R.W. Haley's Critique of Three Studies of Health Effects of the Gulf War

摘要

In a 1998 article in the American Journal of Epidemiology, R.W. Haley challenged the validity of three government-sponsored studies that found that military personnel deployed to the Persian Gulf region in connection with the 1991 Gulf War experienced no excess risk of adverse health effects. The three studies, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996 and 1997, used multivariate statistical procedures to contrast postwar rates of death, hospitalization, and birth defects among Gulf War veterans with those for other military personnel who were deployed elsewhere. Haley claimed that the authors' statistical methods were flawed and their findings were distorted by various biases. The three authours published rebuttals to Haley and Haley also prepared a response to their reply all in the same issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.