Mystery illness among U.S. diplomats did not cause permanent brain damage

For several years, dozens of U.S. diplomats and intelligence agents have fallen ill with a perplexing array of symptoms that some politicians, intelligence analysts, and physicians have speculated may have been triggered by a so-called directed-energy weapon. Whatever caused these anomalous health incidents (AHIs), as the cases have been labeled by the U.S. government, it did not leave lasting brain damage, two new studies suggest. “We hope these results will alleviate concerns about AHIs being associated with severe neurodegenerative changes in the brain,” says Carlo Pierpaoli, chief of the Laboratory on Quantitative Medical Imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. He’s the lead author on one of two papers released today by JAMA in which two National Institutes of Health (NIH) teams gave a battery of tests to more than 80 people who had reported the strange problem. But the studies don’t solve the mystery of what caused these AHIs. The enigma began in 2016, when personnel at the U.S. embassy in Havana experienced headaches, dizziness, and insomnia after hearing strange loud sounds or feeling a sensation of pressure. “The symptoms are real, distressing, and very difficult to treat,” says Leighton Chan, chief of rehabilitation medicine at NIH’s Clinical Center. At the time, then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson blamed a deliberate “health attack.” Heightening the mystery, the...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research