Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
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 You’re all set! ||||| Some service members sleep too little 
  
 Of active-duty military personnel seeking help for sleep complaints, two-thirds get six or less hours per night 
  
 By Nathan Seppa 
  
 Of active-duty military personnel seeking help for sleep complaints, two-thirds get six or less hours per night 
  
 By Nathan Seppa 
  
 Web edition: January 31, 2013 
  
 Some members of the armed forces are strikingly short on sleep, according to a review of medical records of U.S. military personnel. 
  
 The study, which appears online January 31 in Sleep, uses data from active-duty military people who sought out, or were referred to, a clinic because they had a sleep complaint. Even though the study is not a random sample, some scientists believe the low levels of sleep found in the records raise serious questions about the health of the armed forces. Sleep problems in the study sample were often associated with conditions such as chronic pain, anxiety, brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. 
  
 Scientists know that sleep deprivation can affect mood, concentration, reaction time and cognitive function. But little information is available specifically about sleep loss in the military. 
  
 “It’s really the first study to take a good epidemiological look at sleep in military personnel,” says Alan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio who wasn’t involved in the study. 
  
  
  
 Researchers reviewed the charts of every person who was admitted to Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., in 2010 for sleep-related complaints and underwent polysomnography, a diagnostic test that measures physiological changes during sleep. The 725 people whose records were analyzed served in the Army, Navy or Air Force and had an average age of 36. The vast majority of the medical charts belonged to people who had been in combat, and many had been deployed to war zones multiple times. 
  
 Of the people, 85 percent had sleep problems meriting treatment, with sleep apnea and insomnia the most common. Both can cause daytime sleepiness and fatigue. People who didn’t have a sleep disorder mainly snored or had other mild symptoms. 
  
 Nearly 42 percent of the people in the study said they got five hours of sleep or less per night on average, and another 26.5 percent reported only six hours, the reviewers found. “That was the most surprising finding,” says study coauthor Vincent Mysliwiec, a pulmonary and sleep physician at Madigan. 
  
 The risks of sleep deprivation in combat might seem obvious but actually aren’t well understood, he says. “When you’re getting shot at, you just don’t fall asleep,” soldiers have told him. 
  
 The findings suggest that the military needs to think about sleep as a resource that has value, much like fuel or water, he says. Vehicles need fuel and soldiers need water, and neither is sent into combat without enough, he says. “Sleep should be viewed with the same perspective.” 
  
 Instead, soldiers are taught to find downtime to catch up on sleep. “All soldiers need to rest and recover,” Mysliwiec says. “How much is possible in a wartime environment depends on the unit you’re deployed with.” 
  
 Caffeinated beverages such as coffee or so-called energy drinks may contribute to sleep problems as well, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in November. A survey of service members deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 found that those who consumed three or more such beverages per day were more likely than those who drank two or fewer to experience sleep disruption or to fall asleep in briefings or on guard duty – but not while riding in convoys. 
  
 Researchers have long known about the military’s culture of insufficient sleep, say Nita Lewis Shattuck and Stephanie Brown of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., writing in the same issue of Sleep. “For many individuals in the military, sleep is considered a luxury or even a weakness.” The new findings highlight the need for policy changes, they conclude. ||||| When Navy SEAL Robert Guzzo returned from Iraq, he feared seeking treatment for PTSD would endanger his career. The Fold devotes today’s show to telling his story. (The Fold/The Washington Post) 
  
 When Navy SEAL Robert Guzzo returned from Iraq, he feared seeking treatment for PTSD would endanger his career. The Fold devotes today’s show to telling his story. (The Fold/The Washington Post) 
  
 Every day about 22 veterans in the United States kill themselves, a rate that is about 20 percent higher than the Department of Veterans Affairs’ 2007 estimate, according to a two-year study by a VA researcher. 
  
 The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
  
 “There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. “The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it.” The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says. 
  
 As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says. 
  
 VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said his agency would continue to strengthen suicide prevention efforts. “The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement. 
  
 View Graphic U.S. veteran suicides, by day 
  
 The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.” 
  
 Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ­non-veteran peers. 
  
 An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable. 
  
 To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database. 
  
 Bossarte said that men in their 50s — a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population— have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data. 
  
 The VA’s hope is that Bossarte’s work will offer the seeds of a solution to the veterans’ suicide problem. He plans to include in the database death certificate data from all 50 states, Pentagon service records, VA hospital data and information from the VA’s crisis line. 
  
 Once the database is complete, Bossarte will know how many veterans served in combat, the year they left the military and the jobs they held in uniform. He will know how many of the deceased veterans called the crisis line for help and what kinds of treatment they were receiving from VA doctors before taking their lives. 
  
 “The big problem we face in suicide prevention is that we have so little empirical evidence to tell us which programs work,” Bossarte said. 
  
 In an effort to improve veterans’ access to mental health care, the VA committed last year to hiring more than 1,900 mental-health-care workers, all of whom will be on the job this summer. Bossarte hopes that his database will be able to help the VA determine where it needs more mental-health-care workers and how best to train them. 
  
 His database could help counselors know how long they should wait before following up with veterans and how many times they should call. Is one call sufficient, or are counselors better off making several calls over a period of several months? 
  
 Recently Bossarte noticed an interesting trend that followed the VA’s move to change the name of its call center from “suicide hotline” to “crisis line.” Overall call volume spiked in the months after the name change, and emergency rescues, which accounted for about 5 percent of all calls in 2010, dropped to less than 2 percent. 
  
 The figures suggest that more veterans are calling the line before their despair reaches suicidal levels. “We are getting them earlier, and that is a good thing,” Bossarte said. 
  
 Studies of Vietnam War-era veterans found that their suicide risk was highest in their first five years after leaving active duty. “I want to know everything I can find out about that five-year window for today’s soldiers,” Bossarte said. “I want to know whether it is five years or three years or six years.” The answer could help the VA tailor intervention strategies for troops who saw combat over the past decade. 
  
 Another question that has long vexed doctors is whether hospitalizing high-risk patients reduces the likelihood that they will attempt suicide over the long term. Bossarte’s database should help VA doctors know how long they should hold patients and how often they should follow up with them after their release. 
  
 In recent years, national suicide rates have been highest in the rural Mountain West states. Epidemiologists have speculated that the availability of guns, the lack of mental health services and a rugged independent mind-set that stigmatizes seeking help could all be driving up the rate. Bossarte’s data could help pinpoint the culprit and the cure. 
  
 “The VA is a great laboratory,” Bossarte said. “We have a population we can track. We have a national medical system in which we can do enhancements. We may be able to make recommendations that are transportable far beyond the VA’s walls.” |||||
A:
Some 22 US veterans commit suicide on a daily basis, a new VA study finds, marking a jump of about 20% from a 2007 study. And it's unlikely that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the key factor in the increase: More than two-thirds of the suicide victims are 50 or older, the Washington Post notes (see this chart). But even as the number of veteran suicides has increased, so too has the country's overall suicide rate; among all Americans who die by their own hands, the percentage that are veterans has actually shrunk since 1999. "There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true," says the epidemiologist behind the study. "The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it." Still, the suicide rate among veterans is three times the national figure, and advocates say action is needed. "The big problem we face in suicide prevention is that we have so little empirical evidence to tell us which programs work," says the researcher. But he hopes the latest study is a move in the right direction. (In other military health news, another study shows dramatic sleep deprivation is rampant among active-duty troops, ScienceNews reports.)