Association between deployment and Gulf War Illness and adverse COVID outcomes in a nationwide cohort of 1990–1991 Gulf Era war veterans in the VA’s Million Veteran Program
Donna L. White, Alice B. S. NonoDjotsa, Sarah T. Ahmed, Stephen H. Boyle, J. Michael Gaziano, Andrew D. Thompson, Melissa G. Johnson, Elizabeth J. Gifford, Renato Polimanti, Mihaela Aslan, Elizabeth R. Hauser, Drew A. Helmer, on behalf of the Million Veterans Program (MVP) · 2026
Read Association between deployment and Gulf War Illness and adverse COVID outcomes in a nationwide cohort of 1990–1991 Gulf Era war veterans in the VA’s Million Veteran Program by Donna L. White, Alice B. S. NonoDjotsa, Sarah T. Ahmed, Stephen H. Boyle, J. Michael Gaziano, Andrew D. Thompson, Melissa G. Johnson, Elizabeth J. Gifford, Renato Polimanti, Mihaela Aslan, Elizabeth R. Hauser, Drew A. Helmer, on behalf of the Million Veterans Program (MVP) (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13268159.txt.
Description
Donna L White and a large team report a 2026 study of COVID outcomes in Gulf War era veterans. Veterans of the 1990-1991 Gulf War faced many toxic exposures, and about 30 percent live with Gulf War Illness, a long multi-symptom condition. The team used the VA Million Veteran Program, studying 136,868 veterans, and focused on the pre-vaccine year 2020.
Deployment itself showed no strong link to testing positive, hospital or intensive care admission, or death after adjustments. Test positivity was slightly higher in deployed veterans before adjustment. In a smaller surveyed group of 1,643 tested veterans, those with Gulf War Illness had about double the adjusted odds of hospital admission when infected. No clear excess appeared for intensive care or death. The authors say the illness finding needs replication in later pandemic phases.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Donna L. White, Alice B. S. NonoDjotsa, Sarah T. Ahmed, Stephen H. Boyle, J. Michael Gaziano, Andrew D. Thompson, Melissa G. Johnson, Elizabeth J. Gifford, Renato Polimanti, Mihaela Aslan, Elizabeth R. Hauser, Drew A. Helmer, on behalf of the Million Veterans Program (MVP) |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 75888 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC0 |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |