Effects of Gulf War Illness on Brain Structure, Function, and Metabolism: MRI/MRS at 4 Tesla

The goal of this project is to test the overall hypothesis that subjects with Gulf War Illness (GWI) have metabolic, structural, or functional changes in the basal ganglia (a site of proposed brain injury in GWI) and other regions of the brain, which are not accounted for by confounds such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and alcoholism.

This goal will be accomplished by performing a series of brain imaging studies on veteran subjects with GWI and matched veteran controls (GWV). These studies will be performed on a recently acquired 4 Tesla Bruker/Siemens MRI/MRS system at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Studies of the basal ganglia and other brain regions will include high-resolution structural MRI, arterial spin labeled perfusion MRI, diffusion tensor MRI, MR spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging, and functional MRI.  Since improved MRI/MRS techniques are under development, 3 cohorts (of 100 subjects each) consisting of 50 GWI and 50 GWV subjects each (for a total of 300 subjects) will be studied during the 5-yr period of this project. The initial cohort will be studied with techniques currently running on this system, and the future cohorts will be studied with improved techniques, implemented by our team of scientists, during the project period.