Military Service and Survival Among Persons With ALS in the U.S. National ALS Registry, 2011-2023

Affiliates

D Kevin Horton¹, Jaime Raymond¹, Theodore Larson¹, Marc G Weisskopf², Ileana Howard^3,4, Paul Mehta¹

1. Office of Innovation and Analytics, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
2. Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
3. Rehabilitation Care Services, VA Puget Sound Healthcare System, Seattle, Washington, USA
4. Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

Journal

Muscle Nerve

Summary

This study examined the association between military service and survival after ALS diagnosis among participants in the National ALS Registry. Researchers analyzed 8,643 participants who completed the Registry’s Military History Survey between 2011 and 2023, including 1,735 veterans and 6,908 nonveterans. Veterans had poorer survival after ALS diagnosis, with an estimated 5-year survival of 47.1% compared with 57.4% among nonveterans. After adjusting for age at diagnosis, sex, race/ethnicity, smoking history, and alcohol use, veterans had a 25% higher mortality hazard than nonveterans. These findings suggest that military service history may be an important factor to consider when examining survival among people with ALS.

Link to Paper

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