. "Illnesses in Gulf War Veterans." Gulf War and Health: Volume 1. Depleted Uranium, Pyridostigmine Bromide, Sarin, and Vaccines. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2000.
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Gulf War and Health: Volume 1. Depleted Uranium, Sarin, Pyridostigmine Bromide, Vaccines
common diagnostic categories, together accounting for more than 50 percent of primary diagnoses (CDC, 1999).
Registry programs provided an early glimpse into veterans’ symptoms and the difficulties of fitting symptoms into standard diagnoses. As self-selected case series of veterans who presented for care, registries cannot, and were not intended to, be representative of the symptoms and illnesses of the entire group of Gulf War veterans. Nor were registries designed with control groups or with diagnostic standardization across the multiple sites at which examinations took place (Joseph, 1997; Roy et al., 1998). Finally, owing to their reliance on stan-
TABLE 2.2 Most Frequent Symptoms and Diagnoses Among 53,835 Participants in the VA Registry (1992–1997)
Symptoms or Diagnoses
Percentage
Self-Reported Symptoms
Fatigue
20.5
Skin rash
18.4
Headache
18.0
Muscle, joint pain
16.8
Loss of memory
14.0
Shortness of breath
7.9
Sleep disturbances
5.9
Diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms
4.6
Other symptoms involving skin
3.6
Chest pain
3.5
No complaint
12.3
Diagnosis (ICD-9-CM)
No medical diagnosis
26.8
Musculoskeletal and connective tissue
25.4
Mental disorders
14.7
Respiratory system
14.0
Skin and subcutaneous tissue
13.4
Digestive system
11.1
Nervous system
8.0
Infectious diseases
7.1
Circulatory system
6.4
Injury and poisoning
5.3
Genitourinary system
3.0
Neoplasm
0.4
SOURCE: Murphy et al., 1999.
coded elsewhere in ICD-9-CM or without a distinct physiological or psychological basis (U.S. DHHS, 1998).
