Description and Utilization of the United States Department of Defense Serum Repository: A Review of Published Studies, 1985-2012

Specimens in the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Serum Repository have accumulated in frozen storage since 1985 when the DoD began universal screening for human immunodeficiency virus. Use of the stored serum for health research has been carefully controlled, but the resulting publications have never been systematically identified or described. The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC) information systems and open (online) sites were used as data sources. Through 2012, the repository contained 54,542,658 serum specimens, of which 228,610 (0.42%) have been accessed for any purpose. Between 2001 (the first year that comprehensive, digital records were available) and 2012, 65.2% of all approved requests for serum were for healthcare or public health investigations, but greater than 99% of all shipped samples were for research. Using two different methods – a structure search of PubMed and an exhaustive online search based on records from AFHSC – we identified 76 articles published between October 1988 and March 2013 that covered a multitude of infectious diseases, injuries, environmental exposures and mental health conditions through analysis of antibodies, biological metabolic, signaling and regulatory substances, Vitamin D, organochlorines, dioxin, omega-3-fatty acid, and portions of human deoxyribonucleic acid. Despite its operational and scientific value, it appears that the DoD Serum Repository has been underutilized. Changes to policy and increased capacity for specimen processing could increase use of the repository without risking privacy or the availability of specimens for the healthcare of individual service members in the future.