It’s called CTE. You are going to be hearing a lot about it in the future. CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It’s a serious brain disease.
One roadside bomb can trigger it. That’s right – a single blast from a roadside bomb can trigger this incurable brain disease. A new study has found that a lot of young vets have been exposed.
When an IED explodes, it triggers a blast of wind that slams into the air at speeds up to 300 miles an hour. Imagine a blast like that hitting your head. Scientists liken the condition it causes to the brain disorder that professional athletes develop after frequent concussions.
Not every soldier hit by an IED wind blast will develop CTE. But the statistic I read recently in an article on the Stars and Stripes website brought me up short. It said that “more than 460,000 troops may have suffered some traumatic brain injury from roadside bombs since 2001.”
If there’s any good news about CTE, it’s this: Scientists say that finding its cause is the first step in preventing it and finding a cure.
But Ann McKee, Director of the Neuropathology Service of the VA’s New England Healthcare System and Dr. Leo Goldstein, an Associate Professor at Boston University School – the scientists who worked on the CTE brain study – call their findings about the disease “a major cause of concern for a generation of young vets.”
No wonder. Symptoms of CTE can appear two weeks after a bomb blast. According to McKee and Goldstein, even one blast triggers “the build-up of harmful proteins in the brain, indicating the potential for severe lifelong problems.”
CTE resembles Alzheimer’s. Victims have “psychiatric symptoms, learning deficits, dementia and progressive brain cell death” according to the Stars and Stripes story.
No one ever knows what a war’s cost will be when troops are sent to fight. CTE is an unexpected price. But we are stuck with it. And so are young veterans who develop it. Now the problem becomes how to provide for vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with this devastating disease.
We need to stand up and pay for the search to find a cure. We need to pay for the care of young veterans who get CTE – a devastating disease triggered by one bomb blast that left them perhaps otherwise uninjured in Iraq and Afghanistan.