Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in war time deployments for military service members. How have young children been affected by single and multiple Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) deployments? We found young children with a deployed parent showed increased behavior problems during deployment and increased attachment behaviors at reunion compared with children whose parents had not experienced a recent deployment. Child behavior problems were related to many individual child and family characteristics, such as child age and temperament, length of the deployment, total time deployed parent was absent, number of moves, and number of stressors reported by parent. Child attachment behaviors were related to the length of the deployment, number of deployments, and the number of stressors faced by the parent. Soldiers and spouses of soldiers who chose not to re-enlist more often described themselves as depressed, and had children with many more behavior problems at reunion.

Few studies have examined the consequences of alcohol and drug abuse on TBI though they commonly co-occur. Both TBI and substance abuse independently result in neuropathological changes in the brain such as ventricular enlargement and cortical atrophy, thus it is reasonable to hypothesize that the combination of the two would result in more significant cerebral damage. In this study, 3 groups of patients-traumatically brain injured (TBI) with substance abuse~N 5 19), TBI without substance abuse~N 5 19), and substance abuse with no TBI~N 5 16)-were compared with normal controls~N 5 20) on several quantitative MRI (QMRI) measures. Since TBI most frequently occurs in older adolescents and young men, we examined only male participants between 16 and 30 years of age. Comparing young substance abusers to controls resulted in no QMRI differences. When controlling for head injury severity, the effects of substance abuse in combination with TBI resulted in greater atrophic changes than seen in any other group. TBI and substance abuse patients' neuropsychological test performances also were examined, and no differences were found among patient groups on any measures. These findings have implications for the deleterious interaction of substance abuse combining with TBI to result in greater neuropathological changes that can be detected by QMRI techniques. (JINS, 1999, 5, 593-608.)

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