Mental health outcomes worse for UK soldiers who sustained injuries in combat

Serious injuries sustained in combat by male soldiers from the United Kingdom were associated with poor mental health outcomes, and the type of injury influenced the severity of the outcome, per a study published in Lancet Psychiatry.

“Military personnel who sustain a combat injury are at increased risk of poor mental health outcomes, but there is little evidence about the risk of such outcomes in the U.K. military,” Daniel Dyball, BSc, of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research at King’s College London, and colleagues wrote.

Researchers sought to examine the rates of PTSD, depression, anxiety and other mental health-associated multi-morbidities among active and non-active military personnel in the U.K. diagnosed with combat injuries, compared with rates among uninjured personnel.

Data were acquired via the ongoing ADVANCE cohort study, which included 579 combat-injured participants (418 with non-amputation injuries, 161 with amputation injuries) and 565 uninjured participants recruited between August 2015 and August 2020. The latter were frequency-matched by age, rank, regiment, deployment and role in deployment to the former. All participants completed a comprehensive health assessment, which included self-reported mental health measures such as a PTSD checklist, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7.

Results showed that rates of PTSD (16.9% [n=89] vs. 10.5% [n=53]; adjusted OR 1.67 [95% CI, 1.16–2.41], depression (23.6% [n=129] vs. 16.8% [n=87]; aOR 1.46 [1.08–2.03]), anxiety (20.8% [n=111] vs. 13.5% [n=71]; aOR 1.56 [1.13–2.24]) and mental health-associated multimorbidity (15.3% [n=81] vs. 9.8% [n=49]; aOR 1.62 [1.12–2.49]) were greater in the injured group than the uninjured group.

“Long-term follow-up of this cohort ... over the next 20 years will give insight into some of the reasons for the different mental health outcomes between these groups and observe whether the outcomes are maintained with reduced mobility, age-related pain or other factors associated with increased age,” Dyball and colleagues wrote.