Document Type

Article

Peer Reviewed

1

Publication Date

11-1-2002

Volume

110

Journal, Book or Conference Title

Environmental health perspectives

Abstract

Military personnel deployed to the Persian Gulf War have reported a variety of symptoms attributed to their exposures. We examined relationships between symptoms of respiratory illness present 5 years after the war and both self-reported and modeled exposures to oil-fire smoke that occurred during deployment. Exposure and symptom information was obtained by structured telephone interview in a population-based sample of 1,560 veterans who served in the Gulf War. Modeled exposures were exhaustively developed using a geographic information system to integrate spatial and temporal records of smoke concentrations with troop movements ascertained from global positioning systems records. For the oil-fire period, there were 600,000 modeled data points with solar absorbance used to represent smoke concentrations to a 15-km resolution. Outcomes included respiratory symptoms (asthma, bronchitis) and control outcomes (major depression, injury). Approximately 94% of the study cohort were still in the gulf theater during the time of the oil-well fires, and 21% remained there more than 100 days during the fires. There was modest correlation between self-reported and modeled exposures (r = 0.48, p < 0.05). Odds ratios for asthma, bronchitis, and major depression increased with increasing self-reported exposure. In contrast, there was no association between the modeled exposure and any of the outcomes. These findings do not support speculation that exposures to oil-fire smoke caused respiratory symptoms among veterans.

Keywords

Adult, Asthma, Bronchitis, Depression, Environmental Exposure, Female, Fires, Geographic Information Systems, Humans, Kuwait, Male, Odds Ratio, Persian Gulf Syndrome, Petroleum, Prevalence, Risk Assessment, Sustainability, Veterans, Wounds and Injuries

Published Article/Book Citation

"Lange JL, Schwartz DA, Doebbeling BN, Heller JM, Thorne PS. Exposures to the Kuwait oil fires and their association with asthma and bronchitis among gulf war veterans. Environ Health Perspect. 2002 Nov;110(11):1141-6. "

Rights

The article was published in Environmental Health Perspectives. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241071/pdf/ehp0110-001141.pdf Author posting. Copyright © 2002, National Institute of Environemtnal Health Sciences.

 

URL

http://ir.uiowa.edu/oeh_pubs/22