Source/Disclosures
Disclosures: Dyball does not report relevant financial disclosures. Please refer to the study for relevant financial disclosures of all other authors.
Serious combat injuries sustained by male UK soldiers were associated with poor mental health outcomes, with the type of injury influencing the severity of outcome, according to a study published in Lancet Psychiatry.
“Military personnel who sustain a combat injury are at increased risk of poor mental health outcomes, but there is little evidence on the risk of such outcomes in the UK military.” Daniel Dyball, Bachelor of Science, of the King’s Center for Military Health Research at King’s College London, and colleagues wrote.
The researchers tried to examine the rates of PTSDDepression, anxiety and other mental health-associated multimorbidities among active and non-active UK military personnel diagnosed with combat injuries, compared with rates among uninjured personnel.
Data were acquired through the ongoing ADVANCE cohort study, which included 579 combat-injured participants (418 with non-amputation injuries, 161 with amputation injuries) and 565 uninjured participants recruited between August 2015 and August 2020. The latter were matched by age. , rank, regiment, deployment, and role in deployment to first. All participants completed a full health assessmentwhich included self-reported mental health measures such as a PTSD checklist, Patient Health Questionnaire-9, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7.
The results showed that PTSD rates (16.9% [n=89] vs. 10.5% [n=53]; adjusted OR 1.67 [95% CI, 1.16–2.41]depression (23.6% [n=129] vs. 16.8% [n=87]; OR 1.46 [1.08–2.03]), anxiety (20.8% [n=111] vs. 13.5% [n=71]; OR 1.56 [1.13–2.24]) and multimorbidity associated with mental health (15.3% [n=81] against 9.8% [n=49]; OR 1.62 [1.12–2.49]) were higher in the injured group than in the uninjured group.
“Long-term follow-up of this cohort … over the next 20 years will give insight into some of the reasons for the different mental health outcomes between these groups and look at whether outcomes hold with reduced mobility, age or other factors associated with increasing age,” Dyball and colleagues wrote.
