Portable brain-scanners: one Pentagon proposal to help ailing troops
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
I’ve been covering military medical initiatives for around eight months now, and seen the Pentagon struggle with addressing the growing problem of PTSD diagnoses among returning vets. Of course, they’ve come up with some out-there ideas: a pharmacological intervention to prevent post-traumatic stress before it starts, for example. But the military’s also got a growing body of neuroscience on their side, and now the Navy wants to cram dozens of cognitive tests into a portable battlefield brain scanner.
The device would offer near instant diagnosis of brain damage, trauma or the earliest signs of PTSD-related symptoms. Read about that device – and other mental health-oriented gadgets that the Pentagon’s been after – at Danger Room. And there’s no time like to present to educate yourself in war-related mental illness: just today, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that suicide rates among young, male veterans had increased by 26 percent between 2005 and 2007. A startling 20 percent of America’s 30,000 annual suicides are committed by veterans.
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