Research

Dr. Donald Gleason, who served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, devised the scoring system in the 1960s while working at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System.

Dr. Bertrand Huber, an Army Veteran, is the director of the PTSD Brain Bank at the VA Boston Healthcare System. His research focuses on the relationship between traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases, with a primary interest in how the brain clears damaged proteins after injury.

Post-9/11 Veterans have “alarmingly high rates” of insomnia disorder, according to a VA San Diego Healthcare System study. More than half of the Veterans studied had the disorder. Insomnia rates were even higher in Veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and chronic pain.

VA’s COVID Observational Research Collaboratory brings together VA experts to analyze the use and effects of drugs with clinical partners interested in the safety and efficiency of COVID-19 therapies.

Preventing or treating Alzheimer’s a priority for VA research. One recent study focused on apathy, a common behavioral problem in those with Alzheimer’s. Doctor enthusiastic about therapy’s potential.

The research team included investigators from the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, VA Puget Sound Health Care System, VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, and several other research institutions, including Yale University.

His first big paper on cystatin C appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2005. Shlipak and his team found that elevated blood levels of cystatin C accurately predict higher risks of heart disease, stroke, and death among elderly people with no known kidney problems. The creatinine test misses those risks almost entirely, according to the researchers.

In interviews with the researchers, 25 male Veterans and 25 female Veterans who had made a recent suicide attempt discussed their suicidal thoughts. In the moments before they tried taking their lives, the women recalled feeling “shameful,” “tainted,” and “worthless.” The men talked about feeling overwhelmed and remembered thinking, “it just wasn't worth it,” “I've had enough,” and “screw this.”

This is the first human study to test fecal microbiota transplant to potentially reduce alcohol addiction, according to Bajaj. Prior animal studies have shown a linkage between the microbiota and alcohol intake.

Some 700 Veterans who are hospitalized at VA medical centers are being enrolled in the trial, with half getting convalescent plasma and the other half in a control group.

It is a problem that Dr. Kath Bogie has been working on intermittently for nearly 15 years. Bogie and a team of colleagues have now created a "smart bandage" that makes use of electrical stimulation to treat chronic wounds that will not heal on their own.

Huang and Dr. Alex Chan, a postdoctoral research fellow at VA Palo Alto, are studying the effects of nicotine, a highly addictive tobacco stimulant normally inhaled with cigarettes, on therapeutic stem cells.