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Damage to lungs seen in some vets
By Nathan Seppa
Some soldiers serving in the Middle East
who develop difficulty breathing — but
whose chest X-rays show nothing out of
the ordinary — have constrictive bronchiolitis, a kind of lung damage virtually
unknown in young adults.
Reporting in the July 21 New England
Journal of Medicine, physician Robert
Miller of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and his colleagues documented the
condition in 38 of 49 soldiers who served
in Iraq or Afghanistan and came down
with lung problems. Constrictive bronchiolitis, in which tiny airways become
narrowed, has rendered some soldiers
unfit for active duty.
“Most of them say they can’t seem to
catch their breath when exerting them-
selves,” says coauthor Matthew King,
a pulmonologist at Meharry Medical
College, also in Nashville. While anti-
inflammatory medicine and inhaled
steroids can help symptoms, he says,
the soldiers with bronchiolitis don’t
improve. “We have seen no reversibility.”
The researchers discovered the con-
dition by removing and analyzing small
bits of lung tissue from the soldiers,
who turned up ill between 2004 and
2009. All 49 biopsies showed abnormal
tissue despite normal X-rays, and inflam-
mation in 38 of the soldiers indicated
constrictive bronchiolitis. Scarring and
thickening of tissues was common in this
group, and all but one soldier harbored
grayish-black deposits in their lungs.
study of medical records found higher
rates of respiratory problems in personnel deployed there than in those
stationed elsewhere. In March, researchers reported high levels of airborne
aluminum and lead in dust storms in Iraq.
Anthony Szema, a physician and
engineer at Stony Brook University in
New York, has examined a soldier and
found tiny complexes of titanium and
iron in the man’s lungs, where metals
can cause scarring and inflammation.
Mined separately, the two metals could
not have gotten together naturally, only
through a manufacturing process, Szema
reported in Denver in May at a meeting
of the American Thoracic Society, where
he presented the case study. While the
metals’ origin is unclear, he suspects
that garbage-burning pits or exploding
devices sent them airborne.
Miller and colleagues “have been very
aggressive in figuring out what’s going
on” in these soldiers’ lungs, says Andrew
Shorr, a pulmonologist at Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C.
Mirror system
gets an assist
Brain module gets help when
actions can’t be mimicked
By Laura Sanders
When a woman born without limbs
watches someone else sew, copycat
regions in her brain activate even though
she can’t hold a needle herself. Activity
in additional brain regions also demonstrates how flexible the brain is when it
comes to observing and understanding
the actions of others.
Scientists have known for more than
a decade about the mirror system, a network of brain regions usually activated
by watching or performing an action. But
it has been unclear just how the brain
smoothly and quickly intuits what other
people are doing, particularly when the
action isn’t something the observer can
do, says study coauthor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh
of the University of Southern California
in Los Angeles.
In the study, a middle-aged, healthy
woman born with no arms and legs
underwent brain scans as she watched
videos of people performing actions
such as biting into an apple slice, sewing
with a needle or tapping a finger. Actions
that the woman was capable of performing herself activated the mirror system,
including parts of the brain that control
movement. Mirror areas kicked in even
for tasks the woman accomplishes in a
different way, such as picking up food
using her mouth instead of hands. (The
woman had prosthetics briefly as a teen-ager but hadn’t used them in the last
40 years.)
When the woman witnessed actions
that were impossible for her, such as
using scissors, her brain’s mirror sys-
tem still kicked in, but additional brain
regions were recruited to help. These
extra regions aren’t normally needed
when people watch a task they’re able
to perform, the researchers write in
an upcoming Cerebral Cortex. These
regions are thought to be involved in a
process called “mentalizing,” in which a
person tries to understand what some-
one else is thinking.
