Benjamin Natelson, MD, professor of neurosciences at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, will head up a new center dedicated to the study of these unexplained war-related illnesses. Established with a $2 million start-up grant from the federal government that was announced in May, it will be located at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in East Orange. A similar center will be founded in Washington, DC.

The primary focus of the two centers will be research, but clinical care and education will also be important considerations. Veterans of the last four wars in which the U.S. participated have suffered from unforeseen health consequences. Of particular interest to Natelson's team are the unexplained medical complaints of veterans of the Gulf War.

It's about a decade now since many of those veterans came back home. Roughly 697,000 troops were deployed by the U.S. to the Persian Gulf between August 1990 and March 1991 to liberate Kuwait from occupation by Iraq. More than 100,000 of those veterans (one in seven) are still suffering from complaints that they believe started with their involvement in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Their symptoms are very different from those reported by military personnel returning from Vietnam who were exposed to Agent Orange, a defoliant.

Natelson has a long-standing commitment to investigating severe, long-lasting fatigue, one of the primary symptoms of Gulf War syndrome. The other major complaint is hyper-sensitivity to chemicals, but the syndrome can also include headaches, muscle aches, nausea, memory problems and sleep disturbances. He has received continual funding since 1974 from the Department of Veterans Affairs for his studies into the relationship between stress and disease; and also previously earned two large, federal grants to investigate chronic fatigue in Gulf War veterans, as well as other grants to study chronic fatigue in civilians.

The new initiative will expand the research focus, as well as the education and treatment components. The center will have an annual operating budget of $1.5 million.