Identification of Objective Brain Imaging Biomarkers for Gulf War Illness (GWI): Exposure- and Symptom-Specific

Gulf War Illness (GWI) represents a cluster of multi-system chronic symptoms experienced by a third of veterans who served in the Gulf War. To date, accurate detection, and evaluation of ongoing pathology in GWI remains challenging due to the highly heterogeneous symptom profiles within cases and the lack of validated biological tests/markers of the illness. Accurate identification of individuals at earlier stages of the disease is vital to providing therapeutic interventions when these are likely to be most effective to improve the quality of life of veterans with GWI. The research team have found novel imaging features from multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in their previous works. This project is designed to expand our work to a larger multi-site database, the Boston Biorepository, Recruitment, and Integrative Network (BBRAIN), to validate neuroimaging markers further and identifying optimal biomarkers and computational models for diagnosis, subtyping, and informing potential determinants of GWI.