The symmetry rule: A seven-year study of symptoms and explanatory labels among gulf war veterans

Risk Analysis

Volumn 28, Issue 6, 2008, Pages 1737-1748

  Brewer, Noel T ^a   Hallman, William K ^b   Kipen, Howard M ^c  

^a IL   (United States)

^b the State University of New   (United States)

^c RUTGERS ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON MEDICAL SCHOOL   (United States)

Author keywords

Illness cognition; Symmetry rule; Symptom reporting; Terrorism; War

Indexed keywords

ILLNESS COGNITION; SYMMETRY RULE; SYMPTOM REPORTING; TERRORISM; WAR;

LABELS;

COGNITION; HAZARD MANAGEMENT; HEALTH IMPACT; OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE; SYMMETRY; TERRORISM; WAR;

ADULT; ANXIETY DISORDER; ARTICLE; BIOLOGICAL WARFARE; CHEMICAL WARFARE; COGNITIVE DEFECT; CONTROLLED STUDY; DEPRESSION; FATIGUE; FEMALE; GASTROINTESTINAL DISEASE; HUMAN; MALE; MEMORY DISORDER; MENTAL DISEASE; MOOD DISORDER; MUSCULOSKELETAL DISEASE; POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER; THROAT DISEASE; VETERAN; WAR;

ADULT; BIOLOGICAL WARFARE; CHEMICAL WARFARE; COMBAT DISORDERS; FEMALE; GULF WAR; HUMANS; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; MILITARY PERSONNEL; PERSIAN GULF SYNDROME; RISK; RISK ASSESSMENT; VETERANS; WAR;

EID: 55549121270     PISSN: 02724332     EISSN: 15396924     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2008.01118.x     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Barsky, A. J., & Borus, J. F. (1999). Functional somatic syndromes. Archives of Internal Medicine, 130, 910 921.
2. Barsky, A. J., Ettner, S. L., Horsky, J., & Bates, D. W. (2001). Resource utilization of patients with hypochondriacal health anxiety and somatization. Medical Care, 39, 705 715.
3. Barsky, A. J., & Klerman, G. L. (1983). Overview: Hypochondriasis, bodily complaints, and somatic styles. American Journal of Psychiatry, 140, 273 283.
4. Baumann, L. J., Cameron, L. D., Zimmerman, R. S., & Leventhal, H. (1989). Illness representations and matching labels with symptoms. Health Psychology, 8, 449 469.
5. Baumann, L. J., & Leventhal, H. (1985). I can tell when my blood pressure is up, can't I? Health Psychology, 4, 203 218.
6. Bentler, P. M., & Bonnet, D. G. (1980). Significance tests and goodness of fit in the analysis of covariance structures. Psychological Bulletin, 88, 588 606.
7. Blumhagen, D. (1980). Hyper-tension: A folk illness with a medical name. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 4, 197 227.
8. Boyd, K. C., Hallman, W. K., Wartenberg, D., Fiedler, N., Brewer, N. T., & Kipen, H. M. (2003). Reported exposures, stressors, and life events among Gulf War Registry veterans. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 45, 1247 1256.
9. Brewer, N. T., Chapman, G. B., Brownlee, S., & Leventhal, E. (2002). Cholesterol, adherence, and illness cognition. British Journal of Health Psychology, 7, 433 447.
10. Brewer, N. T., Hallman, W. K., Kipen, H. M., & Fiedler, N. (2004). Why do people report better health by phone than by mail? Medical Care, 42, 875 883.
11. Brewer, N. T., Lillie, S. E., & Hallman, W. K. (2006). Why people believe they were exposed to biological or chemical warfare: Reports from Gulf War veterans. Risk Analysis, 26, 337 345.
12. Brewer, N. T., Salz, T., & Lillie, S. E. (2007). The long-term effects of false-positive mammograms: A systematic review. Annals of Internal Medicine, 146, 502 510.
13. Brownlee, S., Leventhal, H., & Leventhal, E. A. (2000). Regulation, self-regulation, and construction of the self in the maintenance of physical health. In M. Boekartz, P. R. Pintrick, & M. Zeidner (Eds. Handbook of Self-Regulation (pp. 369 393). San Diego, CA : Academic Press.
14. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2001). Investigation of Human Health Effects Associated with Potential Exposure to Genetically Modified Corn. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehhe/Cry9cReport/cry9creport.pdf (accessed July 30, 2006).
15. Cioffi, D. (1991). Beyond attention strategies: A cognitive-perceptual model of somatic interpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 109, 25 41.
16. 2 test of goodness of fit. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 23, 315 345.
17. Couzin, J. (2006). Texas earmark allots millions to disputed theory of Gulf War illness. Science, 312, 668.
18. Croyle, R. T., & Sande, G. N. (1988). Denial and confirmatory search: Paradoxical consequences of medical diagnosis. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 18, 473 490.
19. David, A., & Wessely, S. (1995). The legend of Camelford: Medical consequences of a water pollution accident. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 39, 1 9.
20. Fiedler, N., Ozakinci, G., Hallman, W. K., Wartenberg, D., Brewer, N. T., & Kipen, H. M. (2006). Military deployment as a risk factor for psychiatric illness. British Journal of Psychiatry, 188, 453 459.
21. Fukuda, K., Nisenbaum, R., Stewart, G., Thompson, W., Robin, L., Washko, R., et al 1998). Chronic multisymptom illness affecting air force veterans of the Gulf War. JAMA, 280, 981 988.
22. Fullerton, C. S., & Ursano, R. J. (1990). Behavioral and psychological responses to chemical and biological warfare. Military Medicine, 155, 54 59.
23. Gallops, M., Laufer, R. S., & Yager, T. (1981). Part III, appendix 1: The combat scale revised. In A. Egendorf, C. Kadushin, R. S. Laufer, G. Rothbart, & L. Sloan (Eds. Legacies of Vietnam: Comparative Adjustment of Veterans and Their Peers (pp. 125 129). New York : Center for Policy Research.
24. Gilbert, D. T., Krull, D. S., & Malone, P. S. (1990). Unbelieving the unbelievable: Some problems in the rejection of false information. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 59, 601 613.
25. Gray, G. C., Reed, R. J., Kaiser, K. S., Smith, T. C., & Gastanaga, V. M. (2002). Self-reported symptoms and medical conditions among 11,868 Gulf War-era veterans: The Seabee Health Study. American Journal of Epidemiology, 155, 1033 1044.
26. Gray, G. C., Smith, T. C., Knoke, J. D., & Heller, J. M. (1999). The postwar hospitalization experience of Gulf War veterans possibly exposed to chemical munitions destruction at Khamisiyah, Iraq. American Journal of Epidemiology, 150, 532 540.
27. Haley, R. W., Kurt, T., & Horn, J. (1997). Is there a Gulf War Syndrome? Searching for syndromes by factor analysis of symptoms. JAMA, 277, 215 222.
28. Hallman, W. K., Kipen, H. M., Diefenbach, M., Boyd, K., Kang, H., Leventhal, H., et al 2003). Symptom patterns among Gulf War Registry veterans. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 624 630.
29. Hodgson, M. J., & Kipen, H. M. (1999). Gulf War illnesses: Causation and treatment. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 41, 443 452.
30. Horowitz, M. J., Wilner, N. R., & Alvarez, W. (1979). Impact of events scale: A measure of subjective stress. Psychosomatic Medicine, 41, 209 218.
31. Iowa Persian Gulf Study Group 1997). Self-reported illness and health status among Gulf War veterans: A population-based study. JAMA, 277, 238 245.
32. Ismail, K., Kent, K., Brugha, T., Hotopf, M., Hull, L., Seed, P., Palmer, I., Reid, S., Unwin, C., David, A. S., & Wessely, S. (2002). The mental health of UK Gulf War veterans: Phase 2 of a two phase cohort study. BMJ, 325, 576.
33. Jones, E., Hodgins-Vermaas, R., McCartney, H., Everitt, B., Beech, C., Poynter, D., Palmer, I., Hyams, K., & Wessely, S. (2002). Post-combat syndromes from the Boer War to the Gulf War: A cluster analysis of their nature and attribution. BMJ, 324, 321 324.
34. King, D. W., King, L. A., Erickson, D. J., Huang, M. T., Sharkansky, E. J., & Wolfe, J. (2000). Posttraumatic stress disorder and retrospective reported stressor exposure: A longitudinal prediction model. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109, 624 633.
35. Koriat, A., Goldsmith, M., & Pansky, A. (2000). Toward a psychology of memory accuracy. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 481 537.
36. Leventhal, H., Meyer, D., & Nerenz, D. (1980). The common sense representation of illness danger. In S. Rachman (Ed. Medical Psychology, Vol. 2 (pp. 7 30). New York : Pergamon.
37. Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 37, 2098 2109.
38. McCauley, L. A., Rischitelli, G., Lambert, W. E., Lasarev, M., Sticker, D. L., & Spencer, P. S. (2001). Symptoms of Gulf War veterans possibly exposed to organophosphate chemical warfare agents at Khamisiyah, Iraq. International Journal of Occupational & Environmental Health, 7, 79 89.
39. McGuire, W. J. (1960). Direct and indirect persuasive effects of dissonance-producing messages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60, 345 358.
40. Mechanic, D. (1972). Social psychologic factors affecting the presentation of bodily complaints. New England Journal of Medicine, 286, 1132 1139.
41. Meyer, D., Leventhal, H., & Gutmann, M. (1985). Common-sense models of illness: The example of hypertension. Health Psychology, 4, 115 135.
42. Murphy, D., Hotopf, M., Marteau, T., & Wessely, S. (2008). Multiple vaccinations, health, and recall bias within the UK Armed Forces deployed to Iraq. BMJ, 337, 220.
43. Nisenbaum, R., Barrett, D. H., Reyes, M., & Reeves, W. C. (2000). Deployment stressors and a chronic multisymptom illness among Gulf War veterans. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 188, 259 266.
44. Pennebaker, J. W. (1982). Perceptual processes I: Competition of cues. In The Psychology of Physical Symptoms (pp. 169 171). New York : Springer-Verlag.
45. Pennebaker, J. W., & Watson, D. (1989). Blood pressure estimation and beliefs among normotensives and hypetensives. Health Psychology, 74, 309 328.
46. Proctor, S. P., Heeren, T., White, R. F., Wolfe, J., Borgos, M. S., Davis, J. D., Pepper, L., Clapp, R., Sutker, P. B., Vasterling, J. J., & Ozonoff, D. (1998). Health status of Persian Gulf War veterans: Self reported symptoms, environmental exposures and the effect of stress. International Journal of Epidemiology, 27, 1000 1010.
47. Reyna, V. F., & Lloyd, F. (1997). Theories of false memory in children and adults. Learning & Individual Differences, 9, 95 123.
48. Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 32, 880 892.
49. Shapiro, S. E., Lasarev, M. R., & McCauley, L. (2002). Factor analysis of Gulf War illness: What does it add to our understanding of possible health effects of deployment? American Journal of Epidemiology, 156, 578 585.
50. Sigal, L., & Hassett, A. L. (2002). Contributions of societal and geographical environments to "chronic Lyme disease": A psychopathogenisis and aporology of a new "medically explained symptoms" syndrome. Environmental and Health Perspectives, 100, 607 611.
51. Southwick, S. M., Morgan, C. A., Nicolaou, A. L., & Charney, D. S. (1997). Consistency of memory for combat-related traumatic events in veterans of Operation Desert Storm. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 173 177.
52. Unwin, C., Blatchley, N., Coker, W., Ferry, S., Hotopf, M., Hull, L., Ismail, K., Palmer, I., David, A., & Wessely, S. (1999). Health of UK servicemen who served in Persian Gulf War. Lancet, 353, 169 178.
53. Wessely, S. (2001). Ten years on: What do we know about the Gulf War Syndrome? Clinical Medicine, 1, 28 37.
54. Wessely, S., Unwin, C., Hotopf, M., Hull, L., Ismail, K., Nicolaou, et al 2003). Stability of recall of military hazards over time: Evidence from the Persian Gulf War of 1991. British Journal of Psychiatry, 183, 314 322.
55. Wolfe, J., Proctor, S. P., Davis, J. D., Borgos, M. S., & Friedman, M. J. (1998). Health symptoms reported by Persian Gulf War veterans two years after return. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 33, 104 113.
56. Wyshak, G. (1994). The relation between change in reports of traumatic events and symptoms of psychiatric distress. General Hospital Psychiatry, 16, 290 297.