PTSD continues to afflict Vietnam veterans 40 years after the war

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-ptsd-vietnam-20140808-story.html



Forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, 11% of veterans continue to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

PTSD continues to afflict Vietnam veterans 40 years after the war
By Alan Zarembo
8.8.2014

Four decades after the Vietnam War, 11% of its veterans still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to new research suggesting that for some people it is a condition unlikely to ever go away.

The findings, presented Friday at a meeting of the American Psychological Assn., provide a rare look at the long-term course of PTSD in veterans.



The research updates a landmark study conducted in the 1980s, when researchers found that 15% of Vietnam veterans had the disorder. Despite the passage of 25 years and the increasing availability of effective treatments for PTSD, the picture remains much the same.

“People who develop PTSD, if they are going to recover, they tend to recover in the first months or years,” said Dr. Charles Marmar, a psychiatrist at New York University who worked on the original study and the follow-up. “For everybody else it is very chronic.”