Mortality and deployment in a large cohort of Australian Defence Force personnel
Three current military and veterans’ health studies, focusing on deployments to the Solomon Islands (SI), East Timor (EM) and Bougainville (BV), aim to collect self-report and Defence health data from deployed and non-deployed serving personnel and exposure data relating to each deployment. The full nominal rolls and comparison groups of these three studies form a larger North Area of Influence (NNAI) cohort, as part of the Deployment Health Surveillance Program (DHSP) in the Centre for Military and Veterans’ Health.
In total 45936 personnel are included in the NNAI mortality studies. These include the veterans of NNAI operations and frequency matched comparisons.
An important part of these health studies is the availability of mortality and cause of death data for the entire NNAI cohort from the National Death Index from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. We compare death rates in the NNAI cohort with death rates in the general population. We discuss mortality findings in the context of the “healthy soldier effect”, a special case of the healthy worker effect in studies of military personnel. We describe patterns of mortality in the NNAI cohort according to each of the specific deployments and the number and combinations of deployments versus no deployment.
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