ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2006
Multi-symptom illnesses, unexplained illness and Gulf War Syndrome.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Navigating Psychiatric Concerns in a Veteran Reporting Gulf War Illness: A Case Report.The Permanente journal · 2025Article
- Long COVID as a functional somatic symptom disorder caused by abnormally precise prior expectations during Bayesian perceptual processing: A new hypothesis and implications for pandemic response.SAGE open medicine · 2023Review
- A Bayesian account of 'hysteria'.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2012Article
- Gulf war syndrome: a reaction to psychiatry's invasion of the military?Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2008Article
- Immunological dysfunction, vaccination and Gulf War illness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2006Article
- Reflections on Gulf War illness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2006Article
- Managing future Gulf War Syndromes: international lessons and new models of care.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2006Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Explanatory models for the increased prevalence of ill health in Gulf veterans compared to those not deployed to the Gulf War 1990-1991 remain elusive. This article addresses whether multi-symptom reporting in Gulf veterans are types of medically unexplained symptoms and whether the alleged Gulf War Syndrome is best understood as a medically unexplained syndrome. A review of the epidemiological studies, overwhelmingly cross-sectional, describing ill health was conducted including those that used factor analysis to search for underlying or latent clinical constructs. The overwhelming evidence was that symptoms in Gulf veterans were either in keeping with currently defined psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety or were medically unexplained. The application of factor analysis methods had varied widely with a risk of over interpretation in some studies and limiting the validity of their findings. We concluded that ill health in Gulf veterans and the alleged Gulf War Syndrome is best understood within the medically unexplained symptoms and syndromes constructs. The cause of increased reporting in Gulf veterans are still not clear and requires further inquiry into the interaction between sociological factors and symptomatic distress.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.