paul tyson

This a positive step in the right direction.. far too many veterans have been let down for far too long...The Ministry of Defence says armed forces and veteran health is a priority. It has put £3.5 million into a mobile brain lab due to deploy this year to study blast and brain health in personnel, and £50 million into the Valour programme to stitch together fragmented veteran support. ITV News has verified details of seven veterans who served from 1990 onwards and have been diagnosed with AVM. Six of those seven were occupationally or operationally exposed to blast. Only about 15% of the British Armed Forces have that kind of exposure. Independent statisticians told ITV the chance of finding a sample like that at random is less than 0.01%. Another four veterans have a related condition, cavernoma. This is not a closed scientific case. AVM is rare in the general population. Coincidence is still possible. But the pattern is hard to shrug off, and it sits on top of a wider story ITV and others have been documenting for years: repeated blast; including from a soldier’s own weapons in training,can injure the brain and blood vessels. Animal studies have even produced AVM-like changes after repeated low-level blast. US work has also found more brain aneurysms in special forces personnel with higher blast exposure. The practical failure is already familiar. Headaches, memory problems, poor concentration, mood change and sleep collapse look a lot like PTSD. Many veterans get that label. Some of them do have PTSD. Some have both. But if the underlying problem is physical; blast-related traumatic brain injury, vascular damage, AVM, talking therapies and psychiatric pathways will not fix a tangle of vessels that can leak or burst. Wrong diagnosis means the wrong treatment, delayed scans, and people left to deteriorate while the system treats a wound of the mind and misses a wound of the brain...