DOD and VA Trying to Understand Active Duty and Veterans? Duh!

DoD-VA Research Partnership to Improve Understanding of Active Duty and Veteran Health
CA, UNITED STATES
Courtesy Story
Naval Health Research Center
 03.28.2017

“The current study shows the course of PTSD is similar between separated and continuously serving active duty personnel, supporting the use of common treatment methods within the VA and DoD, which will facilitate the transition of patients from one system to the other,” said Faix.

A new partnership between DoD and VA medical researchers achieves a milestone with its first joint publication, which examines post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in veteran and active duty populations. The study will be published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, June 2017.

The new study, the first to compare PTSD symptom trajectories of current and former service members, was authored by researchers from the VA and the DoD’s Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a longitudinal study to evaluate the health of military personnel throughout their careers and after, launched in 2001 and led by the Naval Health Research Center.

“The Millennium Cohort Study is one of the largest sources of self-reported health information of current and former service members,” said Cmdr. Dennis Faix, director of the Millennium Cohort Study and preventive medicine physician. “Many DoD studies only examine current service members and many VA studies begin examining veterans after they have separated from the military. The Millennium Cohort Study is one of the few studies that straddle this line.”

In the joint study, DoD and VA researchers found similar PTSD symptom trajectories in active duty personnel and veterans, suggesting consistency in how both groups experience PTSD over time. Of the four trajectories found in both groups, the most common was the resilient trajectory with low PTSD symptom levels. Veterans, however, were less likely to be classified in the resilient category than those on active duty.
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