Agent Orange Linked to Parkinson's, Heart Disease

July 25 -- FRIDAY, July 24 (HealthDay News) -- Exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides that were sprayed far and wide by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War might put veterans at increased risk for heart disease and Parkinson's.

An Institute of Medicine report released Friday finds "suggestive but limited" evidence of an elevated risk for these two conditions among soldiers who served in that conflict.

Agent Orange is made up of compounds known to be contaminated with a type of dioxin -- tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD) -- during manufacture. The chemical, named for the color of the barrel it was stored in, was one of the "broad-leaf defoliants" used in Vietnam to destroy vegetation to make enemy activity easier to spot.

Between 1962 and 1970, more than 20 million gallons of herbicides were sprayed in the jungles of Vietnam so that American forces could fight more effectively; Agent Orange was the herbicide used most often to accomplish this goal. The International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified TCDD a group 1 carcinogen in 1997, a classification that also includes arsenic, asbestos and gamma radiation, according to background information in the study.

The IOM's report is the seventh update in a series requested by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and mandated by Congress.

Parkinson's and heart disease were in the category of "inadequate or insufficient evidence until this report," said Richard A. Fenske, chair of the committee that compiled the report and a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Those two have been moved to the limited or suggestive evidence of an association, and those are the only two that have been changed."

The "upgrade" of Parkinson's did not surprise Deborah Cory-Slechta, a professor of environmental medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, but she said the outcome could have gone either way.