VA, Defense Department open sleep center to treat veterans, active duty with PTSD - The Killeen Daily Herald: Military
VA, Defense Department open sleep center to treat
veterans, active duty with PTSD
Courtney Griffin | Herald staff
writer | 0 comments
Some of the clinic beds in the
Central Texas Sleep Center look more like bedrooms than something one would
find at a medical facility.
The center, a joint Department of
Veterans Affairs and Defense Department venture, officially opened its doors
Friday afternoon with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“The reason we went into this joint
venture is because there was such a backlog of active-duty soldiers that had
sleep disorders and needed sleep studies done,” said retired Lt. Col. Kevin
Duffy, the center’s administrator, explaining that many suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma-related sleep disorders.
An initiative that began in 2002,
Duffy said the high demand among veterans and active-duty soldiers drove the
joint effort between the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood and
the Temple-based Central Texas Veterans Health Care System.
Duffy said the $5.2 million in
federal funds required to build the center was received in 2008. Construction
on the 16-bed facility started in fall 2013, he said.
In addition to the sleeping rooms,
the facility contains administrative rooms and a control room, where physicians
and technicians monitor breathing, heart rate and other vital signs, he said.
“We look at brain waves because
there are stages of sleep; we call it sleep architecture,” said Dr. Clinton
Young, a physician at the clinic, explaining how doctors measure an average
human’s sleep cycle. “We are looking to see if they spend the appropriate
amount of time in each (sleep) stage.”
Often, about 80 percent of traumatic
brain injury patients suffer from some sort of sleep abnormality, Young said.
Not only can the abnormality make a person extremely tired, but an important
cell regeneration processes only occur in the deeper stages of sleep cycles.
“So people who are not getting the
appropriate amount of sleep, might be prematurely aging,” he said.
When sleeping, TBI patients’ injured
brains also can decrease the amount of oxygen delivered to the brain during
sleep, thus further preventing the brain from sleeping and healing, he said.
“The sooner we get to them, the
better,” Young said.
As officials and Army personnel
mingled in the lobby after the ribbon-cutting, Lt. Col. John Belew, Darnall
chief of staff, said he was glad the clinic was opening, because it meant
better access to health care for veterans and soldiers.
“(Sleep problems) are not something
you realize a lot of the time. ... A primary care physician will ask if you
feel refreshed or tired when you wake up in the morning, and it is a thing that
can really affect your performance,” he said.
Currently, the center is seeing
veterans and active-duty service members by referral only.
Contact Courtney Griffin at
cgriffin@kdhnews.com or 254-501-
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