Letter to the Editor

The high prevalence (28.9 percent) of chronic multisymp-tom illness (CMI) in combat veterans from the first Gulf War, noted in a recent Veterans Affairs study (1), corrobo-rates the findings of earlier studies (2, 3) and is consistent with evidence of nonspecific physical symptoms associated with military combat dating back to the Civil War (4). The authors report an apparently indistinguishable CMI syn-drome in non-deployed Gulf-era service personnel (15.8 percent), suggesting that war exposure increases the rate of what appears to be an identical syndrome that is not un-common in the general population. In the Veterans Affairs study (1), veterans with CMI, when compared with noncases, had higher rates of combat expo-sure. Relations between CMI and psychological trauma/ post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been reporte