The Schneider Institute of Health Policy of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the National Institute of Health and the Department of Veterans' Affairs, as well as 10 other research institutions, have been given funding to explore the link between substance abuse and military deployment. Brandeis was awarded $379,000 for the first year of research that started July 2010 and a total of $1.76 million for four years, wrote Mary Jo Larson, a health services researcher at the Heller School and principal investigator for the project, in an e-mail to the Justice.

"The NIH typically funds both unsolicited and solicited research grants, among other things," wrote Larson.

"In this instance, the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the NIH issued a request for applications; they were joined by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Cancer Institute, and the Veterans Administration."

Larson will collaborate with Schneider Institute researchers Elizabeth Merrick, Beth Mohr and Grant Ritter. Rachel Sayko Adams, a graduate student at the Heller School, will serve as the project director.

According to a Sep. 1 press release on the initiative from PressZoom.com, some institutions that have received this grant will focus on researching when and why veterans ask for help, as well as treatment and therapy strategies, while others will focus on researching ways in which veterans can more easily adjust to the return home after wartime.

The Schneider Institute will investigate substance abuse and the psychological outcomes of having early problem identification and receiving early health services for psychological injuries and problems, according to an e-mail from Larson.

"The [Schneider Institute] aims to provide some objective measures of how frequently problems are identified, care is received, and later problems develop," she wrote.

Parts of the project will be contracted to Kennell and Associates, Inc., a health policy research firm in Falls Church, Va; and the Palo Alto Veterans Administration for its special expertise in veterans' affairs, according to Larson.

According to Larson, the project will take a unique approach: merging military health records and veterans' affairs data for those honorably discharged. These are sets of data from two systems that usually do not converge in the military.

"We can have more confidence in the long-term outcomes we identify because of using our observations will be more complete," wrote Larson.

The cohort study conducted by the Schneider Institute will rely on secondary materials, which are mainly data that others have collected for a different purpose than that of the study. It does not plan to include data or information from any interviews with armed forces service members due to the difficulty of scheduling interviews with busy veterans. However, Larson wrote that "we do plan to survey clinical directors at 80 military installations to understand better the patterns of care we detect in the data."

"There are limits to the questions we can answer without directly speaking to soldiers," she explained in her e-mail, noting that the study will still be "very comprehensive and detailed" because it relies on objective measures like health care utilization.

Larson wrote that the findings from the Institute's research will be used in scientific literature and for presentations.

"We will publish these results in peer-reviewed scientific literature and deliver presentations to our health services colleagues," wrote Larson, who has also been asked to participate in the Heller Tuesday speaker series about military health care.