The Defense Department said Tuesday that a Pentagon-sponsored research project had produced "important" results suggesting that exposure to low levels of nerve gas and some pesticides can lead to memory loss, a common complaint among veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The Pentagon, which acknowledged last year that tens of thousands of American troops may have been exposed to nerve gas shortly after the war, cautioned in a statement that it was too early to draw conclusions from the research, which was conducted on rats. Some scientists suspect that wartime stress is more likely to be the cause of the health problems of gulf war veterans.But one of the researchers on the study, Mark Prendergast, a neuropharmacologist at the Medical College of Georgia, said the tests had been designed specifically with gulf war veterans in mind. "I believe there is definitely a relevance of our data to the illnesses of gulf war veterans," he said.

The Pentagon statement was issued as the newly elected British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair announced this week that it would approve several new research projects to determine the cause of health problems among British veterans of the gulf war, who have complained of memory loss, digestive problems and other symptoms common to American veterans.

The experiments in Georgia, which were financed with a $380,000 grant from the Defense Department, showed that rats who were exposed to low levels of organophosphates - the family of chemicals that includes the nerve gas sarin and many pesticides - experienced brain damage similar to that found in humans with memory loss.

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"I don't think it's too early to draw conclusions," Prendergast said in an interview. "The type of exposure regime that we employed in the animals and the type of exposures that our troops experienced in the gulf are analogous, and the types of memory deficits that we've seen in the animals and those reported by gulf war patients are extremely similar."

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