Impaired response inhibition in ill Gulf War veterans

Poor performance on tasks requiring response inhibition has been observed among chronically ill veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Semantic difficulties have also been reported. We collected event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral data from 25 Gulf War veterans who complained of cognitive difficulties and from 23 matched controls, who were deployed but not symptomatic, while they performed a GO-NOGO task that required both a semantic decision and inhibitory processing. A significantly greater false-alarm rate among the ill veterans was accompanied in the ERP data by significantly reduced amplitude in the NOGO P3, consistent with previous ERP studies of other patient groups that have shown poor inhibitory response performance. This supports the contention that the ill veterans' deficit lies more in inhibiting than in detecting task-related differences in the stimuli.