Forbes A B, McKenzie D P, Mackinnon A J, Kelsall H L, McFarlane A C, Ikin J F, Glass D C, Sim M R
Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Central and Eastern Clinical School, Monash University, The Alfred Hospital, Commercial Road, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Occup Environ Med. 2004 Dec;61(12):1014-20. doi: 10.1136/oem.2003.011791.
A recent report showed that Australian veterans of the 1991 Gulf War displayed a greater prevalence of a multitude of self-reported symptoms than a randomly sampled comparison group of military personnel who were eligible for deployment but were not deployed to the Gulf.
To investigate whether the pattern, rather than frequency, of symptom reporting in these Australian Gulf War veterans differed from that of the comparison group personnel.
Factor analysis was used to determine whether the co-occurrence of 62 symptoms in 1322 male Gulf War veterans can be explained by a number of underlying dimensions, called factors. The methodology was also applied to 1459 male comparison group subjects and the factor solutions of the two groups were compared.
For the Gulf War veterans, a three factor solution displayed replicability and construct validity. The three factors were labelled as psycho-physiological distress, somatic distress, and arthro-neuromuscular distress, and were broadly similar to those described in previous studies of Gulf War veterans. A concordant three factor solution was also found for the comparison group subjects, with strong convergence of the factor loadings and factor scores across the two groups being displayed.
Results did not display evidence of a unique pattern of self-reported symptoms among Gulf War veterans. Results also indicated that the differences between the groups lie in the degrees of expression of the three underlying factors, consistent with the well documented evidence of increased self-reported symptom prevalence in Gulf War veterans.
最近一份报告显示，1991年海湾战争的澳大利亚退伍军人自我报告的多种症状的患病率高于一组随机抽样的符合部署条件但未被部署到海湾地区的军事人员对照组。
调查这些澳大利亚海湾战争退伍军人症状报告的模式而非频率是否与对照组人员不同。
使用因子分析来确定1322名男性海湾战争退伍军人中62种症状的共现是否可以由一些潜在维度（称为因子）来解释。该方法也应用于1459名男性对照组受试者，并比较了两组的因子解。
对于海湾战争退伍军人，三因子解显示出可重复性和结构效度。这三个因子被标记为心理生理困扰、躯体困扰和关节神经肌肉困扰，与先前对海湾战争退伍军人的研究中描述的因子大致相似。在对照组受试者中也发现了一致的三因子解，两组的因子载荷和因子得分显示出强烈的趋同性。
结果未显示海湾战争退伍军人自我报告症状存在独特模式的证据。结果还表明，两组之间的差异在于三个潜在因子的表达程度，这与海湾战争退伍军人自我报告症状患病率增加的充分记录证据一致。
