Scans taken from more than 40 United States government workers who became ill under mysterious circumstances while they were stationed in Cuba revealed potential abnormalities related to their strange symptoms, according to The Daily Telegraph.
The report released on Tuesday said the employees who suffered concussion-like symptoms revealed their brain scans had different features compared to healthy volunteers.
The images revealed the diplomats' brain scans had a lower volume of white matter, which is the tissue made from nerve bundles that send messages around the brain.
They also revealed microstructural differences and other small changes that could impact one's visuospatial and auditory processing.
The medical team warned the findings from the scans were not conclusive, but they do not match what is normally seen in brain injuries.
“It’s a unique presentation that we have not seen before,” said Ragini Verma, a professor of biomedical imaging on the team at the University of Pennsylvania. “What caused it? I’m completely unequipped to answer that.”
Independent experts echoed concerns about the findings still being unclear whether or not if the diplomats were the target of a potential sonic attack or suffered from brain injuries.
The abnormalities could have existed before the attack and could even be related to depression or anxiety.
Dozens of American and Canadian staff members at the U.S. Embassy in Havana complained about a number of medical complaints, including dizziness, headaches, tinnitus, and difficulty sleeping, concentrating, balancing, hearing, and seeing between late 2016 through May 2018.
Most victims said they fell ill in their homes or hotel rooms after hearing grinding or chirping-like noises, which increased speculation about a potential sonic attack targeting the government employees.
The Trump administration responded to the injuries by withdrawing half of its Havana staff, issuing a travel warning, and expelling nearly half of the Cuban diplomats in Washington D.C. over the issue.
The latest study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and detailed how doctors compared brain scans between the u.S. employees who fell ill and two control groups comprised of healthy individuals.
The secondary scans examined for issues at the microscopic level since whenever the brain is injured, the nerve cells die and the damage can be displayed by how much water diffuses around the brain.
More damage leads to increased diffusivity since when there is less nerve structure to keep the water in, but also reduces the tendency for water to move in any particular direction since the nerve fibers that channel the flow have broken down.
Doctors said those results revealed the diplomats' brains had the opposite of brain damage.
The Guardian said: "Instead of rising, diffusivity fell in a region called the vermis, which handles visual and auditory signals. And instead of falling, fractional anisotropy in the region rose."
Which Verma said could be due to a drop in water content in the diplomats' brains, but: “For now all we can say is that something happened and these people should be followed up with more imaging."
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
Photo:
AP / Desmond Boylan
