Pentagon awards big grant to UCSD

Friday, Sep 12, 2008

The Department of Defense has awarded the largest grant ever for study of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury to a nationwide network of research centers led by the UCSD School of Medicine.

The $60 million in funding will allow doctors at the University of California San Diego and nine other research hospitals – collectively called the PTSD/TBI Clinical Consortium – to pursue novel treatments for the growing number of troops and civilians with either condition.

It is one the largest research grants UCSD has received, Leslie Franz, a spokeswoman for the university, said after the project was announced yesterday. “This is really a strategic win for San Diego,” said Dr. Mark Wiederhold, a PTSD researcher and president of the Virtual Reality Medical Center in Sorrento Valley who is not involved in the consortium. “This program is going to go a long way toward addressing the comprehensive care . . . to support these complex injuries.”

PTSD and TBI frequently are called the “signature” wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 300,000 veterans of these conflicts suffer from PTSD or major depression, and about 320,000 likely have sustained brain injuries in the field, according to a RAND Corp. study released in April.

Yet the maladies remain poorly understood, researchers said. “These are areas where the treatments are not very good or nonexistent,” Dr. Murray Stein, a UCSD psychiatrist and the consortiums primary investigator, said at a news conference to tout the grant. “There are so many veterans coming back from these conflicts with these problems, its become hard to ignore.”

But combat troops are only the highest-profile victims of PTSD and brain injuries. According to government estimates, 7.7 million Americans endure PTSD in any given year, and 1.4 million struggle with brain injuries.

A year ago, Congress allocated $301 million to the Pentagon for medical research on PTSD and brain injuries. The sum dwarfs all past military funding of PTSD and TBI medical research, said Gail Whitehead, a spokeswoman for the militarys Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program.

She said the program has given 8,200 grants totaling $4.7 billion since its creation in 1992, most of it for cancer research. Only nine small awards have been for PTSD or TBI.

Source: San Diego Union Tribune