Tomah VA Medical Center

Dr. Douglas J. Lanska receives the Lawrence C. McHenry Award at the American Academy of Neurology annual awards luncheon March 13 in San Diego from Professor Victor Henderson of UC-San Francisco and Professor Anne Jeanjean of Saint-Luk University in Brussels, Belgium.

Dr. Douglas J. Lanska was honored with the Lawrence C. McHenry Award at the American Academy of Neurology annual awards luncheon March 13 in San Diego.
He received the award after more than a decade of research concerning the effects of war on the development of nutritional disorders, specifically neurological disorders resulting from vitamin deficiencies.
Lanska was the recipient of this award for other work in 1997 and 2001, and is now the only person to have received this honor three times.
Lanska was selected this year for historical scholarship in his paper, “Nutritional Night Blindness as a Manifestation of Vitamin-A Deficiency Eye Disease among Soldiers in the U.S. Civil War.”
The paper showcases the difficulties faced by physicians in the treatment of disorders that are poorly understood, the tendency for conditions to be misattributed to other causes, and the potential negative influence of official policies on health and disease during wartime.
Lanska's study documented the effects of inadequate micronutrients in the rations and other food sources available to soldiers, the lack of recognition and understanding of the disorder by medical officers, the lack of relevant information in military medical manuals, the marked seasonal features of the illness and the similar seasonal patterns of other nutritional illnesses and diarrheal disorders, and the benefits of dietary modification in treating the disorder.
This historical research relates directly to modern medicine as vitamin A deficiency eye disease continues to be a major cause of blindness around the world, particularly in poverty-stricken and war-torn countries.
Lanska said his interest in this subject came from working with veterans.
“My original interest in the study of war-related nutritional deficiencies and their long-term effects came from patients of mine who had been prisoners of war held by the Japanese during World War II,” said Lanska. "As I have learned more about how vitamin deficiency disorders affect the nervous system, I have been able to recognize these disorders earlier in patients that I am consulted on, and have often been able to intervene at a point when permanent disability could be prevented."
According to Lanska, much of the current scientific understanding about vitamins in fact stemmed from war-related nutritional problems.
“Neurological diseases resulting from war-related nutritional deficiencies have now been documented in every major war since the Crimean War in the mid-1800s, including the U.S. Civil War and both World Wars,” said Lanska.
In 2008, Lanska discussed some of these issues as the keynote speaker for the American Neurological Association's Presidential Symposium on "Neurological injuries caused by war: what have we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan?"
Every year since then, as a speaker at national scientific meetings, Lanska has discussed neurological vitamin deficiency disorders occurring among soldiers and civilians in war-torn countries. This has increased awareness of these disorders among professional colleagues.
In his research, Lanska uncovered a little known source of information that gave him further insight into the vitamin A deficiency eye disease, the data collected systematically for Union soldiers by the U.S. Surgeon General during the U.S. Civil War.
This data had not previously been studied in any detail. Although outbreaks of seasonal vitamin A deficiency eye disease have been subsequently reported throughout the 20th century, particularly in war-torn or undeveloped countries, none approaches the magnitude of the problem experienced by soldiers during the U.S. Civil War in terms of the absolute number of individuals affected over a similar period of time. Most of the later reports of vitamin A deficiency eye disease did not provide population-based information, and none covered such a large population with as much detail.