What Are the Rates of PTSD in Persian Gulf War Veterans?
Several large studies examined the rates of PTSD diagnoses in samples of Persian Gulf War (PGW) veterans (e.g., Iowa Persian Gulf Study Group, 1997; WRAIR, 1994). In the Iowa Study, 1.9 percent of deployed regular military personnel had symptoms of PTSD (as measured by the PTSD checklist) compared with only 0.7 percent of nondeployed. Comparable estimates for deployed and nondeployed National Guard/reservists were 2.0 percent and 1.1 percent respectively (Iowa Persian Gulf Study Group, 1997). Overall, observed rates of PTSD in other studies of active-duty troops or reservists found rates of PTSD under 10 percent (see Appendix A, Table A.1), although some of the studies of samples that experienced verifiable combat-related events, such as graves registration duty, reported higher rates of PTSD (the highest being 46 percent, Sutker et al., 1994). While rates of PTSD were high in a few samples of Gulf War veterans exposed to combat-related events, the data most generalizable to the entire
