American doctors have diagnosed US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with an untreatable lung disease that is possibly caused by inhaling toxic material in the war zones.
According to a report published in the latest issue of New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Matthew S. King, an assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and colleagues diagnosed 80 American soldiers from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with a critical respiratory disorder that interferes with their ability to do physical exercise, Health Day News reported Thursday.
Forty-nine of them agreed to undergo the open lung biopsies. Of that number, 38 were diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis. Constrictive bronchiolitis is a rare non-reversible lung disease in which the small airways in the lungs are compressed and narrowed by scar tissue or inflammation.
The analysis also revealed that twenty-eight of the 38 American soldiers diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis had been exposed to a sulfur-mine fire near the Iraqi city of Mosul, located some 400 kilometers (250 miles) northwest of the capital Baghdad, in 2003.
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