Armed forces members who served in Afghanistan and Iraq may have been exposed to high levels of dust and other respiratory dangers that can cause chronic respiratory conditions like asthma and bronchitis. Researchers from National Jewish Health and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) worked together to look into lung disease seen in military personnel who had been on deployment.
Heather Lowers, a research geologist with the USGS, will talk on Monday at the GSA Connects 2022 conference in Denver about what she has learned about the dust that stays in the lungs of military people who have been deployed.
Lowers said, “I never imagined I would be looking at human lung tissue in my career.” We were introduced to a group of pulmonologists and lung pathologists who were working to better understand how inhaled particulate matter could result in lung injury through some previous work that we had done looking at first responders to the World Trade Center. A Department of Defense grant has been awarded to several of my National Jewish Health co-authors to investigate the root of some unexpected lung injuries in service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. ”
A clinic has been established by National Jewish Health with funding assistance from the Department of Defense to assess military personnel who have returned from deployment but are showing signs of lung injury. As the project’s geologist, Lowers’ responsibility was to create a technique for extracting and analyzing lung particulate matter. Lowers looked at the size and composition of inorganic particles found in the lungs by making high-resolution images of microscopic particles and figuring out what elements they were made of.
Sixty-five surgical lung biopsies were performed on the 250 deployers who visited the National Jewish Health clinic as part of their clinical care, and 24 of them consented to have their lung biopsies used for this study. The 11 civilian control samples from donated lung specimens that matched the deployers’ ages and smoking histories were compared to the 24 deployers’ lung biopsies.
“In comparison to the controls, we discovered that, on average, military deployers did have more retained dust in their lungs per cubic centimeter of tissue. “Compared to the dust that was kept in the control group, the particles also appeared to be smaller in size overall,” Lowers said.
Additionally, they discovered that the lung dust levels of both deployers who reported low or no sandstorm exposure or medium-high sandstorm exposure were higher than those of the control samples.
“Soldiers work in a generally dusty environment, even when there are no dust storms. As a result, we were examining a summary of everything they would have inhaled while on deployment, “Lowers said. “You’re going to kick up dust and breathe it in, even when driving a truck across the desert floor.”
Lowers hopes that more samples can be studied to find out more about the properties of dust that stays in the lungs, even though these analyses do give some helpful information about the lung damage seen in military personnel who have been deployed before.
It’s been difficult for me to recruit enough participants for these studies, which is one of the difficulties I’ve encountered working with human subjects. Therefore, even though there are generally differences between the controls and the deployers, there are only a few samples available, “Lowers said.”
Based on how much more dust is found in the lungs of military personnel who have already been on deployment, it will be important to find good ways to protect deployers from dust.
