The Neurological Effects of Repeated Exposure to Military Occupational Blast: Implications for Prevention and Health
Abstract
There has been growing concern over potential subconcussive neurological injury following repetitive low-level military occupational blast exposure (MOB). Examples include heavy weapons training and activities such as breaching. To address this issue, the Seventh Department of Defense (DoD) State-of-the-Science Meeting (SoSM) was held March 1215, 2018, at the RAND Corporations offices in Arlington, Virginia. These proceedings include background information on the meeting and its theme, summaries of a systematic RAND Arroyo Center literature review and meeting and poster presentations, and complete working group findings and expert panel conclusions and recommendations. The SoSM expert panel recommended that DoD leaders (1) enforce DoD policies and standards related to low-level MOB; (2) develop high-quality research assessing the occurrence of repeated, low-level occupational blast injury; (3) plan and complete a large-scale population based longitudinal study of military personnel with long follow-up to assess neurological and general health outcomes after repeated, low-level MOB exposure; (4) emphasize research on large animals, including nonhuman primates, as part of the departments animal research initiatives to improve the applicability of findings to humans; (5) complete studies that compare extant MOB exposure assessment tools, protective practices, and protective devices with improvement approaches to facilitate incremental gains in safety and outcomes; (6) catalogue, map, and make available to researchers, safety programs, and military end users unclassified weapon systemspecific information and service memberspecific load profiles for key military occupations, exposures, and contexts; and (7) increase opportunities for embedded scientists to study low-level MOB exposure among training units and in deployed contexts.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 12, 2018
- Accession Number
- AD1096664
Entities
People
- Charles C. Engel
- Emily Hoch
- Molly Simmons
Organizations
- RAND Corporation