Post by Ms. Kathy on Apr 11, 2008 8:02:14 GMT -6
I don't know why I didn't have this one here already since I have students with TBI. It's getting more attention since the war.
Vets’ group: Link between TBI, blindness needs more attention
By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
A few days after the blast from a mortar round almost threw him off the Hadithah Dam in Iraq three years ago, Navy Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Glenn Minney reported to sick call with a headache and itchy eyes.
The medics treated him for pinkeye.
When he returned a month later because he felt as if he were looking at the world through a veil, the battalion surgeon again treated him for pinkeye.
“I couldn’t see well enough to fire my weapon,” Minney told the House Veterans’ Affairs oversight and investigations subcommittee April 2.
The next day, he woke up blind in his right eye. The unit decided to evacuate him. Immediately upon arriving in Germany, he had surgery on both eyes.
After returning to the States, he was sent home to recuperate.
“The second day I was home, I lost my vision,” he said.
His eyes weren’t the only problem. “The eye healed from the surgeries,” he said, “but it was also the optic nerve that was damaged as a result of a traumatic brain injury.”
Minney had also lost brain tissue in the occipital lobe, which controls the eyes, as a result of the blast, which isn’t uncommon when the concussive wave of an explosion whips the head back.
An estimated 1,400 troops have vision problems caused by combat injuries, but hundreds of undiagnosed eye problems may afflict troops with traumatic brain injury.
According to the Blinded Veterans Association, 75 percent of service members with TBI also have complaints about vision problems including double vision, lack of peripheral vision, color blindness and total blindness.
“The numbers seem to be a moving target here,” said Thomas Zampieri, director of government relations for the BVA.
He said the numbers now are “drastically” higher than they were three years ago, but he has been unable to get a total from the Pentagon. “The answer … has been either that this information is unknown or that it cannot be shared.”
He’s also angry that a new Blind Center of Excellence was mandated in 2008 but was not funded, and has since been downgraded to little more than a registry. More is needed, he said, including research and education of health care workers.
“I’m embarrassed to ask, ‘Could you guys put the $5 million in there somewhere?’” he said.
Zampieri said he has talked to retired military sources who report that as many as 3,000 men and women may have been returned to duty in Iraq after being treated for eye injuries, and that as many as 7,000 veterans, if properly screened, would be diagnosed with some visual dysfunction.
Losing sight affects everything else, he said, noting that veterans with blast injuries often also suffer hearing loss.
But many vision-impaired soldiers are not quickly diagnosed because, like post-traumatic stress disorder or mild traumatic brain injuries, these eye injuries are not always readily apparent. And some physicians don’t seem to know what to look for; if they’re looking for an injury to the eye itself, they may miss the brain injury, as they did in Minney’s case.
His TBI wasn’t diagnosed until 10 months later, when a Department of Veterans Affairs physician requested an MRI.
Minney had spent time at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and Camp Lejuene, N.C. None of those major military medical facilities “bothered to look inside my head,” he said. “The VA did.”
Army Col. Loree Sutton, director of the military’s Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, acknowledged that vision problems “could be overlooked in initial diagnosis.”
Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, former acting Army surgeon general, said more research needs to be done so doctors know what to expect from TBI, as well as what the best screening tests are. She also said researchers are working to find out how close to a blast a person must be to be affected.
Pollock has been appointed “conceptual director” of the military’s new Eye Center of Excellence in San Antonio, although she said she is moving to a “retirement position” July 7.
Pollock said she will present the Army’s next steps April 17.
But lawmakers said research efforts should not constitute a reason for inaction now.
“There’s no excuse for not taking care of them once we know this problem exists,” said John Boozman, R-Ariz. “These are some pretty blatant cases.”
Zampieri said Minney’s story isn’t new. “There are at least 12 others with similar stories,” he said. “That should be disturbing to the people in this room.”
In some cases, an injury was simply ignored.
Army Staff Sgt. Brian Pearce lost his sight when shrapnel cut into his right occipital lobe in October 2006 in Iraq.
The day after the injury, his wife, Angela, learned that her husband had gone blind. Doctors decided not to worry about his vision, however, because his head injury was so severe that he was in a coma-like state for 47 days.
But even after he regained consciousness, the Pearces say they were told not much could be done about his eyes. As he spoke, his wife leaned in closely to help. Eventually, she took over. Pearce also has problems with short-term memory loss.
“I kept being told his vision didn’t matter at that point,” she said. “‘We need to worry about his traumatic brain injury.’ We had no idea what was going on with his vision.”
She chose to transfer her husband to a VA treatment center in Richmond, Va., but no one connected his vision problems to the brain injury. If they had, Angela Pearce said she may have chosen a TBI center because nothing is wrong with her husband’s eyes — his brain simply can’t interpret the signals they send.
“My eyes are actually very healthy and I have 20/20 vision,” he said. “It is my brain that will not allow my eyes to function appropriately.”
In the meantime, paperwork needed to complete his military disability retirement was locked in the mail room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for two weeks, delaying his retirement, and his Blind Rehabilitation Outpatient Specialist quit the Richmond VA center because, Pearce said, he was frustrated by the bureaucracy and the lack of cooperation within the polytrauma network.
He was left with no care for his eyes from June until October 2007.
He later entered the Eastern Blind Rehab Center, where he underwent six weeks of therapy, and he continues to receive VA treatment. But he wonders how much better his vision would be if his TBI problems had been addressed earlier.
“Bad news doesn’t get any better with time,” he said. “‘Son, You’re blind.’ OK. Got it. Moving on. They didn’t do that.”
Source Link: Navy Times www.navytimes.com/benefits/health/military_tbi_040808w/
Vets’ group: Link between TBI, blindness needs more attention
By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
A few days after the blast from a mortar round almost threw him off the Hadithah Dam in Iraq three years ago, Navy Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Glenn Minney reported to sick call with a headache and itchy eyes.
The medics treated him for pinkeye.
When he returned a month later because he felt as if he were looking at the world through a veil, the battalion surgeon again treated him for pinkeye.
“I couldn’t see well enough to fire my weapon,” Minney told the House Veterans’ Affairs oversight and investigations subcommittee April 2.
The next day, he woke up blind in his right eye. The unit decided to evacuate him. Immediately upon arriving in Germany, he had surgery on both eyes.
After returning to the States, he was sent home to recuperate.
“The second day I was home, I lost my vision,” he said.
His eyes weren’t the only problem. “The eye healed from the surgeries,” he said, “but it was also the optic nerve that was damaged as a result of a traumatic brain injury.”
Minney had also lost brain tissue in the occipital lobe, which controls the eyes, as a result of the blast, which isn’t uncommon when the concussive wave of an explosion whips the head back.
An estimated 1,400 troops have vision problems caused by combat injuries, but hundreds of undiagnosed eye problems may afflict troops with traumatic brain injury.
According to the Blinded Veterans Association, 75 percent of service members with TBI also have complaints about vision problems including double vision, lack of peripheral vision, color blindness and total blindness.
“The numbers seem to be a moving target here,” said Thomas Zampieri, director of government relations for the BVA.
He said the numbers now are “drastically” higher than they were three years ago, but he has been unable to get a total from the Pentagon. “The answer … has been either that this information is unknown or that it cannot be shared.”
He’s also angry that a new Blind Center of Excellence was mandated in 2008 but was not funded, and has since been downgraded to little more than a registry. More is needed, he said, including research and education of health care workers.
“I’m embarrassed to ask, ‘Could you guys put the $5 million in there somewhere?’” he said.
Zampieri said he has talked to retired military sources who report that as many as 3,000 men and women may have been returned to duty in Iraq after being treated for eye injuries, and that as many as 7,000 veterans, if properly screened, would be diagnosed with some visual dysfunction.
Losing sight affects everything else, he said, noting that veterans with blast injuries often also suffer hearing loss.
But many vision-impaired soldiers are not quickly diagnosed because, like post-traumatic stress disorder or mild traumatic brain injuries, these eye injuries are not always readily apparent. And some physicians don’t seem to know what to look for; if they’re looking for an injury to the eye itself, they may miss the brain injury, as they did in Minney’s case.
His TBI wasn’t diagnosed until 10 months later, when a Department of Veterans Affairs physician requested an MRI.
Minney had spent time at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and Camp Lejuene, N.C. None of those major military medical facilities “bothered to look inside my head,” he said. “The VA did.”
Army Col. Loree Sutton, director of the military’s Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, acknowledged that vision problems “could be overlooked in initial diagnosis.”
Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, former acting Army surgeon general, said more research needs to be done so doctors know what to expect from TBI, as well as what the best screening tests are. She also said researchers are working to find out how close to a blast a person must be to be affected.
Pollock has been appointed “conceptual director” of the military’s new Eye Center of Excellence in San Antonio, although she said she is moving to a “retirement position” July 7.
Pollock said she will present the Army’s next steps April 17.
But lawmakers said research efforts should not constitute a reason for inaction now.
“There’s no excuse for not taking care of them once we know this problem exists,” said John Boozman, R-Ariz. “These are some pretty blatant cases.”
Zampieri said Minney’s story isn’t new. “There are at least 12 others with similar stories,” he said. “That should be disturbing to the people in this room.”
In some cases, an injury was simply ignored.
Army Staff Sgt. Brian Pearce lost his sight when shrapnel cut into his right occipital lobe in October 2006 in Iraq.
The day after the injury, his wife, Angela, learned that her husband had gone blind. Doctors decided not to worry about his vision, however, because his head injury was so severe that he was in a coma-like state for 47 days.
But even after he regained consciousness, the Pearces say they were told not much could be done about his eyes. As he spoke, his wife leaned in closely to help. Eventually, she took over. Pearce also has problems with short-term memory loss.
“I kept being told his vision didn’t matter at that point,” she said. “‘We need to worry about his traumatic brain injury.’ We had no idea what was going on with his vision.”
She chose to transfer her husband to a VA treatment center in Richmond, Va., but no one connected his vision problems to the brain injury. If they had, Angela Pearce said she may have chosen a TBI center because nothing is wrong with her husband’s eyes — his brain simply can’t interpret the signals they send.
“My eyes are actually very healthy and I have 20/20 vision,” he said. “It is my brain that will not allow my eyes to function appropriately.”
In the meantime, paperwork needed to complete his military disability retirement was locked in the mail room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for two weeks, delaying his retirement, and his Blind Rehabilitation Outpatient Specialist quit the Richmond VA center because, Pearce said, he was frustrated by the bureaucracy and the lack of cooperation within the polytrauma network.
He was left with no care for his eyes from June until October 2007.
He later entered the Eastern Blind Rehab Center, where he underwent six weeks of therapy, and he continues to receive VA treatment. But he wonders how much better his vision would be if his TBI problems had been addressed earlier.
“Bad news doesn’t get any better with time,” he said. “‘Son, You’re blind.’ OK. Got it. Moving on. They didn’t do that.”
Source Link: Navy Times www.navytimes.com/benefits/health/military_tbi_040808w/