Veterans now face two daunting questions arising from a third study linking concussions with degenerative brain diseases, which can cause cognitive, behavioral and mood impairment – and ultimately death.

The newest study, another collaboration between Boston University and the Boston VA Healthcare System, found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 68 brains that had been donated to them posthumously. They included 64 athletes, including 18 who were also military vets, plus three additional vets without a sports background and one individual who was neither – he had a history of injurious head-banging behavior.

Among the athletes, 34 were professional football players. However, nine of the athletes had played only college football. And six had played only high school football.

But all showed the classic signs of CTE: tangled knots of a protein known as tau in the brain cells. These tau lesions can damage brain cells and ultimately lead to their death, according to Dr. Ann McKee, lead author of the study.

The study also added another new element. It concluded the CTE is a progressive disorder, and it divided CTE into four stages, each with its own distinctive symptoms. Headaches and deteriorating attention and concentration were common in stage one. In stage two, symptoms expanded to include depression, explosive outbursts, and short-term memory impairment.  By stage three, victims were having trouble thinking and were having difficulty with executive functions like planning, organization, multitasking and judgment. Dementia , including memory loss and cognitive impairments  severe enough to impact daily living, were characteristic of stage four.

It’s alarming to think that high school and college football players could be doing such damage to their brains that they would die early of degenerative brain diseases, but the study provided several examples: Eric Pelly, a former high school football and rugby player who died at the age of 18 from complications resulting from concussions and who was diagnosed with stage 1`CTE, and Ron Perryman, a former Boston College linebacker who died from respiratory failure associated with Amyotrophic  Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) at the age of 42 and was diagnosed with both CTE and motor neuron disease (MND).

So there are two daunting questions that vets, athletes and anyone suffering from brain injuries need to ask.

First, how and why does an earlier injury lead to a possible degenerative brain disorder years later?

And second, what can we do to prevent it?

We’ll consider those questions in the next two parts of this series of columns.

Veterans are largely protected from being thrown off the “fiscal cliff” if the Republicans in Congress can’t reach a nonpartisan compromise with the Obama Administration.

Largely protected … but still not nearly enough.

Vets won’t get their benefits cut, says Rep. Jeff Miller, Fla., who chairs the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.  “The good thing is that the law states and the president has agreed that veterans dollars and their benefits are off the table as it relates to the sequestration,” Miller explains. “The only area that the VA is vulnerable in is in some of the administrative areas or some of the areas that (the Department of Defense) actually handles, like Arlington Cemetery.”

That spares the VA from $1.2 trillion in sequestration cuts, but the problem is that the Veterans Administration is completely overwhelmed at the moment with the influx of Vietnam and current-era vets seeking help. Even with a budget that has doubled to $125.3 billion over the past decade, it can’t begin to handle more than 1 million new Iraqi-Afghan vets, about a third of whom are seeking mental health care.

“With as many as 1 million troops due to become veterans in the next five years, on top of the 22.3 million already in the system, the agency is staggering under backlogs in disability compensation claims, bottlenecks in mental health care, and criticism over a general lack of accountability,” Bloomberg News reported last month.

“The system is completely overwhelmed,” Craig Bryan, a clinical psychologist and associate director for the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah, told Bloomberg News. “We did not prepare the VA system for what many of us would argue is the natural consequence of combat and protracted warfare, and we’re trying to play catch-up.”

In mid-November, the VA had about 896,000 disability compensation and pension claims pending, almost double the number of cases pending at the end of October 2009. Two thirds of those claims had been in the system for more than 125 days, which is the agency’s target time to have such claims resolved.

Four months may not seem like a long time, but those delays are living hell to vets in physical and emotional pain. Dr. Bruce Swarny has patients who wait at least two months and drive 400 miles round trip to visit him in the Glendive (Mont.) Medical Center. He estimates that about half of them have contemplated suicide.

Montana leads the nation in the rate of suicide, but it’s also a huge problem nationally. The VA estimates that 18 vets a day take their own lives, and 1,600 to 1,800 veterans receiving VA care commit suicide each year, according to a 2011 report by the inspector general.

To understand why, just take a look at Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment – a group of Marine Reservists from Salt Lake City. Tony Dokoupil tells their harrowing story in the Daily Beast.

They arrived in Baghdad a day before the statue of Saddam Hussein fell. As they walked into the city, they accepted flowers from women and patted children on the head. Then their radio operator was shot through the head, and they were in the midst of a withering crossfire.  To protect themselves, they shot at everything that moved – and they killed a bunch of civilians, including women and children.

The Daily Beast reported that: “Although all the men in the unit came home alive, many came home changed. Within five years, one in four had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Today one in two of them carries debilitating psychic wounds, according to an estimate by the men. They are jobless, homeless, disposed to drugs and alcohol, divorced from their spouses, and cut off from their former selves. One made love to his girlfriend, the mother of his twin daughters, then immediately drowned her in a warm bath. If you ask the military and mental-health establishment what happened to the men of Fox Company, the answer is simple: they lived through ‘events that involved actual or threatened death,’ felt ‘intense fear,’ and like the 300,000 other service members who share this narrow official path to PTSD, they were badly shaken by it.”

Their full story is at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/12/02/a-new-theory-of-ptsd-and-veterans-moral-injury.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_afternoon&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_afternoon&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet. It’s a heart-breaking tale, but a must-read nonetheless.

That’s why it’s not enough just to have the VA protected from sequestration cuts. It must be strengthened and streamlined to provide care to the men and women that this country has put into harm’s way.

I also have to say that I’m personally outraged by the political posturing and the partisanship that I see each day in Washington. This isn’t about winning a jousting match with the Obama Administration. It’s about human lives.

A quarter  century ago, when there still was some civility in Washington, D.C., former President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a remarkable point to his would-be biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Johnson said: “A political party at a national convention draws up a program to present to the voters. The voters can either accept it by giving the party full power, reject it by taking the party completely out of power, or give it qualified approval by giving one party the Congress and the other party the presidency. And when we in the Congress have been given a qualified mandate, as we were in 1956, it means that we have a solemn responsibility to cooperate with the president and produce a program that is neither his blueprint nor our blueprint but a combination of the two. It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things.”

Well, that’s exactly what we have today: a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, but a stanchly Republican House of Representatives. The only thing we lack today is Johnson’s “solemn responsibility to cooperate.”

Connie Louie-Handelman, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, was impressed with the success of the “tapping therapy,” Emotional Freedom Techniques, during the year she worked as an Army Reserve psychologist at a forward operating base in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.

Prior to her deployment in July 2011, she had been using EFT as a performance-enhancing technique among athletes, and she continued using it with soldiers.

“I found it worked quickly in eliminating fears, limiting beliefs, pain, and releasing traumatic events,” she told me. “It was quick and easy to get relief. Most importantly, it was something I could teach soldiers to do on their own.”

Louie-Handelman remembers one sergeant with deep religious convictions who was tormented with nightmares because he feared he was desecrating the bodies of soldiers when he took DNA samples. The nightmares were so severe he was unable to function, she said.

“But after four tapping sessions, he told me he was surprised that his nightmares had gone away,” she said. “He was able to finish his tour, and I saw him until he went home.”

When soldiers asked her how EFT works, she explained that it’s an energy therapy. “Any negative emotion blocks our energy flow, and we know it’s there because we keep reliving that event,” she said. “Tapping helps us push that negative emotion out of the way.”

Louie-Handelman said her records showed she had about 575 therapy sessions with nearly 200 soldiers. “I used EFT on 90 percent of my patients,” she said, “and I estimate 60 to 70 percent of them got better.  I know that because they were able to go back to work.”

But it’s still a therapy that’s scientifically unproven. John Medina, author of the best-selling book “Brain Rules,” called it “promising,” but told me: “The data are mixed concerning PTSD and acupuncture currently; nothing definitive that I am aware. The biggest reason is that there have been no randomized double-blinds with sufficient numbers.”

Medina pointed me to a study five years ago, the first scientific randomized controlled pilot trial that looked at the effects of acupuncture on PTSD. It found that “Acupuncture may be an efficacious and acceptable nonexposure treatment option for PTSD.”  Specifically, it found acupuncture to be as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy, and both to be preferable to no treatment at all. “Larger trials with additional controls and methods are warranted to replicate and extend these findings,” it concluded.

Dr. Dawson Church and several colleagues recently concluded a study of 16 teenagers who had been abused. Half the group which received no treatment did not improve in measurements of two components of PTSD (intrusive thoughts and avoidance techniques), but the other half improved with a single session of EFT. “These results are consistent with those found in adults, and indicates the utility of single-session EFT as a fast and effective intervention for reducing psychological trauma in juveniles,” the study concluded.

The Veterans’ Stress Project is looking for vets with PTSD who are willing to participate in a study measuring the effectiveness of EFT in treating PTSD.  You can get more information about the project from its research coach, Marilyn McWilliams, at  Marilyn@EFTCatalyst.com

“Courage After Fire” was the name of a conference I recently attended. It was about transitions, about bridging the gap between military and civilian life.

We’re all familiar with “courage under fire,” the phrase that defines our military heroes, but today on Veterans’ Day, “courage after fire” seems a more appropriate phrase.

Today, more than 57,000 vets are homeless, tens of thousands have no jobs, and close to one third of those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury or major depression.

These are problems that our society must address, and thankfully, a number of organizations and individuals are stepping up to the plate.

U.S.VETS, for example, has an innovative program called “Outside the Wire.” At six Southern California community colleges, U.S.VETS staff and interns from the University of Southern California and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology reach out to veterans who may be unaware they’re dealing with PTSD or who may be hesitant to seek help from the VA out of fear it could hinder their efforts to get jobs, especially in law enforcement.

Early intervention is a very cost-effective strategy; U.S.VETS treats a student veteran for approximately $560, about a tenth of the cost of an in-house program later on when a veteran’s psychological issues have become more intense.

“Outside the Wire” also counsels the families of these returned warriors — their spouses, children, even their parents — who grapple with the effects of their loved ones’ combat experiences. In the last year, “Outside the Wire” has served 400 vets and their families.

On this Veterans’ Day, remember that it’s also important to support those who are reaching out to help our vets.

Dan Hoaglin may be the poster-child for PTSD in upstate New York.

Last spring, Hoaglin talked with News8 television in Rochester, N.Y., about how difficult it was to return to civilian life after being conditioned by years of survival under battlefield conditions. A retired staff sergeant with the 89th Military Police Brigade out of Fort Hood, Texas, Hoaglin has served tours of duty in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and two stints in Iraq during 11 years in the Army.

“Most people don’t have the ability to say yes, I saw a mortar round blow up five car lengths away, but I have. So now when a car backfires, that same response, the same initial surge that kept me alive years ago causes problems for me,” he said. “It can be devastating. My heart will begin to race. I start to look for spotters on the tops of buildings. I’m looking for who guided this in. If I see something, that will pose a threat to me. And all threats to me, I deal with with a great deal of hostility.”

His wife Angie told the news channel that her husband’s behavior changed drastically after his second tour in Iraq. “He was not happy,” she said. “It was like five hours after he got home we got into a huge fight.”

Hoaglin said he tried just about everything – diet and nutrition, hypnotherapy, exposure therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, medications, and Reiki energy therapy – but he was still thinking about committing suicide on a daily basis.

It all came to a head on the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, when Hoaglin told the news channel that he began to experience an “empty rage.” He began drinking heavily and passed out in the driveway of his upper New York state farm with a sword in his hand. “When I woke up, there was a person in a black uniform pointing a pistol at me,” he said. “It was a cop that was coming to pick me up to take me to the hospital. But I didn’t recognize him because I had slipped back into being down range.”

After that, Hoaglin quit drinking, and he turned to an alternative energy therapy called EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques).  That involved remembering the events that stressed him, then telling himself that he was not to blame for those events. As he did so, he began tapping on his acupressure points on his face, his torso and his hands.

Some energy therapists believe this allows the body’s energy to flow freely after being blocked by bad memories, but Tempe, Ariz., psychologist James R. Lane, writing in “Energy Psychology” magazine, had a more detailed medical explanation:

“Recent research indicates that manual stimulation of acupressure points produces opoids, serotonin, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and regulates cortisol. These neurochemical changes reduce pain, slow the heart rate, decrease anxiety, shut off the fight/flight/freeze response, regulate the autonomic nervous system, and create a sense of calm. This relaxation response reciprocally inhibits anxiety and creates a rapid desensitization to traumatic stimuli.”

Hoaglin learned the technique from Tom Porpiglia, a Vietnam vet who runs Life Script Counseling Services in Rochester and who is working with the Veterans’ Stress Project to test the effectiveness of EFT on combat vets with PTSD.

Porpiglia said Hoaglin tested in the 70s on his initial PTSD evaluations (the max is 85, and anything above 50 is considered clinical PTSD), but that he dropped to a 24 after six sessions. That was last April, and News8 said only time would tell whether the improvements would hold up over time.

Last week, Porpiglia told me that Hoaglin’s scores had risen from 24 to 38, adding “this is a bit unusual so early in the cycle, but given all that he has been through, understandable.”

Tapping the acupressure points to remove anxiety is something that Hoaglin can do himself, but Porpiglia said he would offer more services if Hoaglin’s condition worsens.

Vets suffering from PTSD can learn more about EFT and the Veterans’ Stress Project from Marilyn McWilliams. Her email is Marilyn@EFTCatalyst.com

Next up, we’ll talk with an Army Reserve psychologist who successfully used EFT on soldiers in Afghanistan.

George McGovern never thought of himself as a hero, but I did. He was an honorable ma who lived an honorable life until his death early Sunday morning at the age of 90. He had some tough losses, but he always faced them with courage … and a wry sense of humor.

In particular, I’ve always been impressed with George’s contention that he came to hate war while waging it. A World War II bomber pilot who won the Distinguished Flying Cross, he became one of the leading voices against American involvement in Vietnam, a principled stand that cost him dearly among the blood-and-glory crowd.

I’ve known the McGoverns since the late 1970s, when I was the statehouse correspondent in Pierre, S.D., for The Associated Press.  George’s humiliating defeat to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential race must have been still fresh and painful, but he never let it show.

I remember spending a day on the campaign trail with the McGoverns. Both were exhausted, but George would not leave an auditorium, a supermarket line or a street corner without shaking every hand. I also remember how his late wife Eleanor was vivacious and charming as she worked a political reception, then sagged when she was out of the spotlight.

I lost touch with the McGoverns in the 1980s after George was appointed the first United Nations Ambassador on Global Hunger and began a new career of challenging the world to feed the hungry at home and abroad. But I was deeply moved by his 1997 book, “Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism.”

When I called to offer my condolences, George told me a tragic story. He said that he and Eleanor went to see a counselor for advice on handling Terry’s drinking problem. The counselor told them that they were enabling Terry’s drinking by accepting her collect phone calls home, often late at night. So they took the counselor’s advice and basically shut her out. Then on a cold winter night, she stumbled out of the back door of a bar in Madison, Wis., fell into a snowbank and froze to death. George never forgave himself for what must be every father’s worst nightmare.

A few years later, I was writing my own series of stories on alcoholism, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. When Hazelden published the stories as a book, “Alcohol: Cradle to Grave,” I sent an advance copy to George, who responded with a ringing endorsement: “I feel enlightened after devouring this powerful book.”

So it seemed natural a few years ago when I was writing “Faces of Combat: PTSD & TBI,” to ask George to write a foreword. “I’ll do the best I can,” he responded. But it wasn’t to be.  George had new American wars to oppose, and his remarkable strength was being sapped by his advancing years.

When I look back on George’s life, I’m struck by the courage he displayed in taking unpopular stands based on his principles. He displayed a sense of honor and courage that is increasingly rare in politics today.

That’s why I consider George McGovern to be a true American hero.

Military housewives from Fort Campbell, Ken., are finally getting the attention they want – and deserve – in calling the nation’s attention to the plight of their husbands, who have been returning home from war with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and with traumatic brain injuries (TBI).

Ashley Wise, 29, remembers being angry that no one was paying attention, so she thought: “I feel like streaking the general’s lawn.  Maybe a naked woman would get the attention.”

That’s how the “Battling Bare” campaign was born, and that’s how the nation began paying attention.

The New York Daily News recently reported that Staff Sgt. Robert E. Wise, a former Marine and Army veteran who has served three tours of duty in Iraq, had been showing signs of PTSD for years, but his condition began to deteriorate last year until he finally disappeared to a hotel room with “two cases of beer and all the guns in the house.” When his wife finally located him, he told her, “Life is just really hard.”

“He wasn’t sure if he could go on,” Wise told the Daily News. As he continued to spiral downward, she went to the military for help, but felt angry and ignored when they charged him with domestic assault for an outburst she’d told them about to get help with his emotional problems.

So she decided to act on her idea … sort of. She created the “Battling Bare” campaign on a Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/BattlingBare . In the past six months, hundreds of women have taken off their shirts and inked themselves with a “pledge” to stand by their husbands as they heal, and to spread word that these veterans need help coping with mental health issues that can’t be seen.

“This is a pledge that you’re making for your spouse that, in my opinion, is just as important as marriage vows,” Wise told NBC News.

It’s a tasteful campaign, but a telling one. Wise told FOX News that she used eyeliner to pen the “Battling Bare” pledge on the back of Army wife Jennifer Brown. It reads:

Broken by battle

Wounded by war

My love is forever –

This to you I swore.

I will quiet your silent screams

Help heal your shattered soul

Until once again, my love,

You are whole.

Another of the military spouses, Alicia McCoy, told CNN that her husband, Sgt. Brandon McCoy, committed suicide in March. She said her husband sought help for PTSD, but it wasn’t enough.

“Our soldiers have a lot to say,” McCoy said. “They have a lot bottled up inside of them, and no one is listening. I feel like they are afraid to be able to say what they need to say, because they’re afraid it’s going to hurt their record.”

Wise told CNN that the “Battling Bare” mission is to spread the word about PTSD.

“We want to ensure that the stigma of PTSD goes away and people talk about it,” Wise said. “That’s really the biggest thing. In talking, there’s healing and not ignoring it. Because we’re ignoring it now, and people are dying.”

Researchers say they’ve found a gene that appears to increase or decrease the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder among combat vets.

If this study can be replicated, it could help answer the question of why one soldier experiencing trauma develops PTSD while another does not. That, in turn, could lead to ways to boost stress resilience.

“We’re really excited about this because it may help us open a new paradigm between PTSD and TBI,” says Dr. Mark Miller, a clinical and research psychologist with the VA’s National Center for PTSD and an associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine. “People studying TBI-related impairments have found that TBI and PTSD are often highly correlated. What we’re thinking is that there may be some commonality that has a molecular basis to it. I’m kind of anticipating that next decade or so will show lot of advances in neuroprotective and neurodegenerative responses.”

Miller and his team recently published an article in “Molecular Psychiatry” which explained the work they did in what’s believed to be the first genome-wide scan for genetic risk factors associated with PTSD. Their work followed up on studies of twins which showed that sensitivity to stress could be inherited, that it wasn’t totally a function of stress in the environment.

First came DNA samples from 496 military veterans and 233 of their spouses; 53.7 percent of the participants met the criteria for PTSD.  Then the researchers analyzed genetic data for association with PTSD using a microarray chip that contained probes for 2.5 million SNP (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) spread across the entire genome

“SNPs are rungs on the ladder of the DNA double helix called base pairs where there is known variation across humans,” Miller told me. That allowed researchers to see if the stressed vets shared any common genetic difference.

It turned out that they did, and it wasn’t a gene that Miller and his team were familiar with. They found a statistically significant association with a variant of the retinoic acid orphan receptor A (RORA) gene, which was unfamiliar to them at the time.

“RORA has never been linked to PTSD before to our knowledge,” said Miller, the study’s lead investigator. “But when we read up on it, we found that it had previously been linked to other disorders such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, autism and depression. In other words, it was a psychiatrically relevant gene.”

One of the major roles of RORA is protecting brain cells from the damaging effect of injury and disease and possibly traumatic brain injuries, Miller told me. He believes RORA produces a protein that helps protect neurons from neurotoxic effects of stress, including oxidative stress. An imbalance between oxidants and antioxidants in a cell, oxidative stress can be caused by physical damage or traumatic stress.

“Our hypothesis is that those who have the RORA risk marker may have a RORA gene that is less capable of mounting a neuroprotective reaction to stress, causing structural damage and functional changes to neurons that RORA should be protecting,” said Miller.

Again, this is a new study that hasn’t been replicated, but if future studies bear out its findings, researchers may be able to develop gene therapies or pharmaceutical ways to enhance the function of the RORA gene. And that may help stress-vulnerable people become more resilient.

Incidentally, the genome-wide association study is an extremely broad-based look at all associations, rather than a selective look at just some of the usual suspects – specifically the dopamine and the serotonin systems.

“We looked at the serotonin transporter valve and didn’t see any strong association,” Miller told me. “However, there’s plenty of literature supporting its importance. The caveat goes back to the limitations of GWAS. We have to apply such a strict statistical threshold that many lesser associations had to fall by the wayside. The fact that we didn’t find it in this study doesn’t mean it doesn’t play a role in the general population or in a population substrata.”

Nearly a decade ago, Avshalom Caspi published a groundbreaking paper in “Science” magazine that charted the lives (from 3 to 26 years old) of more than 1,000 white New Zealanders in what became known as the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study.

He focused on serotonin, the neurotransmitter that carries electrical signals across a synapse from one neuron to another, then gets sucked up by the first neuron to be used all over again. He noticed that about 17 percent of his study group had what’s known as a short form of the serotonin re-uptake valve, 51 percent had some short and some long forms of this gene, and 31 percent only had the long form (which apparently is more effective in sucking the serotonin back up).

All of his subjects experienced some form of trauma, but those with the long form of the serotonin re-uptake gene handled it better. Among the participants suffering four or more traumatic events, 33 percent with the short form became depressed as adults, compared with only 17 percent who had the long form.

This is another study that hasn’t been replicated, but that seems very promising. And Miller says he isn’t about to rule it out yet.

Last weekend, I began to understand why some football players have brain injuries that can be as severe as combat vets.

I was the guest on a three-hour, live radio broadcast from Bozeman, Mont., and I was discussing the study out of Boston that found neurodegenerative brain diseases among former soldiers and athletes, but none among a control group that had no history of concussions or traumatic brain injury. One small study showed that any brain injury could increase the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Another larger study showed that professional football players were four times more likely than the general population to suffer from CTE.

Then the station got a call from Corey Widmer, and we spent the next half hour discussing his eight-year career as a middle linebacker with the New York Giants … and the number of times he got his bell rung.

“I was pretty much in the trenches for the whole time,” Widmer told me. “The middle linebackers typically aren’t covered, so you’ve got to go over the guard who tends to be a pretty big guy. The impacts are a lot more than any other position except for fullback.”

Widmer said linebackers average about 240 pounds while the guards were averaging 310 to 320 pounds.  “We’d run at each other for 10 or 15 feet, picking up some pretty fair momentum, and then collide,” he said. “We got some of the biggest impacts.”

At Montana State University, where he’s currently in the Hall of Fame, Widmer was taught to tackle with his head up. “I always got dinged around. I remember my rookie year, I hit a guy from Kansas State and we both got knocked out. We were sitting there staring at each other and waiting to see who could get up first,” said Widmer.

That didn’t change when he played professional football. “When I hit, I hit with my face, and I would literally bend the steel face mask every game,” he said. “Sometimes it would pancake the whole helmet.”

The Rydell helmets had a plastic lining that would freeze rock-solid in cold weather, he said. That was common in Montana and New York. And the turf used to freeze in Giants Stadium, so when his helmet hit the ground, his brain took another bruising.

That’s what happened when Widmer suffered a concussion so severe that the coaches held him out of the game and sent him to medical specialists for a battery of tests. Afraid of losing his job (and a million-dollar paycheck), he stormed out of the doctor’s office. Shortly after that, he found himself in the middle of a fight on the practice field.

“It was at that moment that I noticed something had changed,” he told me. “I felt more aggravated at times. It was then that I became a complete believer that concussions can change personalities.”

Widmer misses football these days, the adrenalin-charged games, the 18-hour days leading up to each game, and the responsibility for never letting his teammates down. Today, he’s looking for something as fulfilling and exciting as football.

“I used paragliding to fill the void,” he said., “It’s a pretty extreme sport.”

But five years ago, Widmer had an accident in the Chilean Andes and broke his back. While he’s back on his feet again, he needs another challenge.

Sound familiar?  This echoes the stories that scores of vets have told me about how they felt in combat and the letdown they felt when they finally got home.

“Football is basically controlled combat,” neuroscientist John Medina, author of the best-selling “Brain Rules,” told me the other day.   Widmer agrees. And the NFL is looking for ways to protect its athletes better.

There’s a study currently underway at the Boston VA Healthcare Center, where researchers are reportedly finding that some combat vets are aging more quickly than the general public.

Last week, USA Today reported that America’s newest combat veterans, former soldiers and Marines in their 20s and 30s, appear to be growing old before their time. It said scientists are seeing early signs of heart disease, diabetes, slowed metabolism and obesity that would be more common to middle age or later.

The project’s co-director, William Milberg, a Harvard Medical School professor, was quoted as saying, “They should have been in the best shape of their lives. The big worry, of course, is we’re going to have to be taking care of them until they’re in their 70s. What’s going to happen to them in the long run?”

USA Today said some form of early aging seems most common to those with signs of blast-related concussion and PTSD, which seems to involve about 30 percent of the 340 vets being studied.

It quoted Milberg as saying that researchers were initially alarmed to discover a former soldier, younger than 40, with brain lesions, obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. When they ran the patient through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, Milberg said the scans looked like they belonged to someone in their 70s,

“That’s when we got alerted that maybe we were going to see something like these precursors we associate with old age (but) in a younger population,” he told USA Today.

That was followed by a story in UK’s Daily Mail, in which Milberg was quoted as saying that the brains of about 150 veterans showed significant signs of stress.

When I asked the VA Boston Healthcare Center for a copy of their research report, I was told: “At this time there is no report or published paper. Drs. Milberg and McGlinchey are in the process of writing up their research for peer review and publication, so we have nothing we can send you.”

I don’t doubt the veracity of the published reports, but they appear to be based on preliminary data. It will bear watching to see what the final results will show.  And there’s no indication when this data will be published.

But the results as reported would certainly be consistent with what we already know about stress.

In his best-selling book “Brain Rules,” which is a must-buy for anyone interested in understanding the human brain, Dr. John Medina notes that chronic stress leads to heart attacks and strokes. And stress ravages the immune system, leaving people increasingly vulnerable to infection.

“Not surprisingly, people who experience chronic stress are sick more often,” he wrote. “A lot more often. One study showed that stressed individuals were three times as likely to suffer from the common cold. People were especially vulnerable to the cold-producing virus if the stressors were social in nature and lasted more than a month. They were also more likely to suffer from autoimmune disorders, such as asthma and diabetes.”

Medina said stress is behind more than half of the 550 million working days lost each year due to absenteeism. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asserts that a full 80 percent of our medical expenditures are now stress-related,” he added.

So if the team of Boston neuroresearchers does find that combat vets, especially those suffering from PTSD and TBI, are aging more quickly than the rest of our population, it won’t be a huge surprise. But it should be a factor in the way we fund our healthcare treatment for vets in the decades to come.