Nearly 30 percent of recent combat vets treated by VA have PTSD
A recent VA report on post-traumatic stress disorder revealed that nearly 30 percent of veterans who served in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and treated at VA hospitals were diagnosed with PTSD, The Daily Beast reports.
The report, posted to the VA's website without fanfare, showed that 247,243 of the 834,463 treated veterans from the two conflicts were diagnosed with PTSD, the news organization reported.
Josh Taylor, a VA spokesman, told The Daily Beast the agency still estimates the overall PTSD rate to be 20 percent across the entire population of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, not just those who sought treatment from VA facilities.
The Daily Beast reported that Taylor's assessment comes from "current literature," and that Taylor cited as recent a 2008 RAND Corp. study titled "Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery." That report was based on a collection of PTSD existing data collected from April 2007 to January 2008.
According to a 2010 study published by the American Journal for Public Health and cited by The Daily Beast, troops who’ve been deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan are more than three times as likely as soldiers with no previous deployments to screen positive for PTSD and major depression.
The Daily Beast cited another VA in-house discrepancy from 2009, in which the VA estimated a PTSD rate, based on a 2004 study, of 12 percent and 18 percent for Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, respectively. But a VA healthcare report that same year said the number of PTSD sufferers who'd actually been seen by doctors was 23 percent, the Daily Beast reported.
Source: The Daily Beast
