Study reveals drop in assault-related hospitalizations for troops

:wow: So repeated deployments are allaying boredom and cutting down on barroom brawls? :wow:

Study reveals drop in assault-related hospitalizations for troops
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, March 17, 2008


HEIDELBERG, Germany — Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan appear to have had at least one surprising health benefit for the U.S. miltary: Fewer barroom brawls and other opportunities for ending up in the hospital with a fractured skull.

According to a new study by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, the rate of military members being hospitalized for assault-related injuries has significantly fallen since repeated war deployments began in 2003. The rate went from 3.59 of every 10,000 servicemembers being hospitalized with injuries from assault in 1998 to 2.54 per 10,000 last year.

“What we think it represents is taking young military members out of the circumstances where they would have mixed alcohol and boredom,” said Col. Bob DeFraites, a preventive medicine doctor and the director of the center. “There’s just not the opportunity for the assaults. Not that that’s a better thing.”

The study, recently published in the center’s Medical Surveillance Monthly Report, looked at reports from U.S. military hospitals worldwide from 1998 through summer of last year to chart the number of admissions for injuries received in assaults.

The study found that over that nine-year period, 4,105 servicemembers — most of them young and male — were hospitalized for injuries related to “non-combat assaults and fighting.” During that period, 104 servicemembers were hospitalized twice, and two were hospitalized three times for assault-related injuries.

More than half the injuries involved head trauma or brain injury, and more than 40 percent included a fractured skull. Overall, about one in 30 did not survive, the study found.

:wow:

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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=53378