A Green Beret who had served several combat tours fatally shot himself in a Cybertruck that exploded outside a Trump hotel on New Year’s Day.
In an interview, Dr. Jaffee listed the symptoms associated with C.T.E. Many were identical to what Ms. Arritt said she had seen in Sergeant Livelsberger.
In some cases, Dr. Jaffee said, the symptoms of brain injury can plateau. In others, he said “the disease is degenerative — there is a downward progressive course.”
Repeated blows to the head and blast exposure may cause damage that can accumulate almost unnoticed over time, said Dr. Michael Jaffee, a retired Air Force colonel and a neurologist who was director of the military’s Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center and now runs a similar center at the University of Florida. Neurologists now measure risk of developing a brain injury, including the progressive disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., not in terms of number of concussions sustained, but in terms of time involved in high-risk activities.
“The more years of exposure, the higher the risk,” Dr. Jaffee said. One of the high-risk activities officially listed by the National Institutes of Health, he noted, is “military service.”
It is impossible to definitively diagnose in living patients the type of progressive brain injury that can result from repeated, low-level exposure; it can only be diagnosed post-mortem in an autopsy. Because of this, Dr. Jaffee said, the problem is routinely misdiagnosed or missed entirely. “There’s a reason it’s called an invisible injury. It’s not always obvious.”
Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.
Dave Philipps writes about war, the military and veterans and covers The Pentagon. More about Dave Philipps