WSU to Study Iraq Toxins' Effect
Spokesman-Review
by Bert Caldwell
Research to examine how exposure might damage offspring of soldiers
Washington State University scientists will use a $1.7 million grant to study what multi-generation genetic damage might be done by toxins U.S. troops could encounter in Iraq.
The research using laboratory rats, not humans, will be the first for the military to examine the epigenetic effects of pesticides, herbicides and other compounds, said lead scientist Michael Skinner, director of the university's Center for Reproductive Biology.
Previous studies have looked at the health effects of other substances, notably the Agent Orange used to defoliate jungles in Vietnam, on the soldiers directly exposed, he said, not on their children or grandchildren.
"The science really had not caught up with the trans-generational stuff," said Skinner, one of several WSU pioneers in the field of epigenetic, or multi-generational, inheritance.
Besides herbicides and pesticides – which and in what combinations has not been determined – the study also will look at the effects of explosives residues, he said.
The four-year study will allow researchers to see how any changes in genetic chemistry that develop are passed along through two subsequent generations of rats, he said, noting that only the first two years of research have been funded.
Among the problems that might develop are kidney disease, or changes in the male and female reproductive organs, he said.
If any genetic markers are identified in rats, Skinner said, follow-up research could look at whether they might show up among members of the military as well.
That would be of particular interest to Dave Holmes, interim chief operating officer of the Institute for Systems Medicine, which was awarded the U.S. Department of Defense grant passed through to Skinner.
Holmes' son, Tim Hammond, did two tours in Iraq with the U.S. Marine Corps.
"They sprayed all kinds of stuff on them," Holmes said.
Although the grant money, the first awarded ISM, will fund work in Pullman, he said the organization's supporters hope any subsequent clinical studies will be done in Spokane.
"There's a lot of excitement about making it happen," he said.
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VA researchers seek answers to unexplained illnesses through technology
Health » Analysis aims to find links between symptoms and causes.
If Jackson Pollock had worked on whiteboards, his art might have looked something like the piece hanging on the wall of Matthew Samore's office.
The board is a jumbled mess of colors, figures and lines. But underneath the dry-erase abstract is order -- or the potential for it.
Samore is part of a team of Department of Veterans Affairs researchers using a combination of medical expertise, computer science and social research techniques to extract information from millions of clinical notes. The goal is to identify patterns in symptoms that might help physicians treat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose conditions are otherwise unexplainable.
As have generations of combatants before them, thousands of veterans have returned from the nation's ongoing wars with medical conditions unexplained by current epidemiological science, including gastrointestinal problems, respiratory illness, blood disease and skin rashes. Until recently, however, researchers interested in reviewing the medical records for similarities among groups of veterans were mostly limited to reviewing the records from their own hospitals.
Researchers have long coveted the enormous cache of medical records held by the VA -- an early adopter of digital record-keeping technology and the largest health system in the nation. But concerns about privacy have long limited who could access the VA records kept at four regional data warehouses.
The solution, according to Samora and other researchers, is VINCI -- the Veterans' Informatics and Computing Infrastructure -- which provides researchers with a secure, virtual working environment in which they can use data derived from VA patient records.
The Salt Lake City-based initiative, which is operating on a research and technology budget of about $4.7 million this year, currently supports more than 20 projects, including Samore's study. Similarly elaborate studies completed without access to the records could cost millions each.
The system, in which researchers are able to access the data and the analysis tools behind a firewall, is intended to prevent the loss or misuse of confidential patient information.
"The VA is absolutely adamant about protecting the information in those records," said VINCI program manager Tori Barrett.
Barrett said that researchers are only permitted to access and work with the data within VINCI's virtual environment, a process intended to help prevent data breaches-- such as the 2006 theft of a laptop computer that contained the sensitive data on nearly 30 million veterans.
But even once he could access the data in a secure environment, Samore had a problem:
"Doctors don't like recording information about their patients by clicking boxes," Samore said. "They prefer the expressivity of narration. They want to be able to describe their patients' conditions. But people on the data collections side don't like that, because they can't easily analyze it."
Samore and his fellow researchers will use the older technique of content analysis and a field of computer science known as natural language processing. They hope to convert physicians' narratives into structured data. What patterns will be revealed from the millions of key words identified in the study is anyone's guess.
And Samore is reluctant to promise quick answers.
After all, it has taken 40 years for science to link some veterans' symptoms to exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and research on other illnesses possibly linked to the toxic contaminant continues today. Researchers trying to understand the causes of Gulf War Illness -- which began appearing in veterans of the first war in Iraq in 1991 -- are also finding it difficult to tie symptoms to specific origins.
"Trying to disentangle causes from symptoms and symptoms from causes is tough," he said. "What caused what? It's not something that always has a clear cut answer. From a researcher's standpoint, that can be very frustrating."
But the closer researchers can come to answers, Samore said, the closer veterans can get to better care. "And that, of course, is the goal."
mlaplante@sltrib.com / blogs.sltrib.com/military
