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Respiratory: From Board Denial to Court Reversal

The two-step reality of a respiratory appeal: what the Board does with these issues, and — when veterans appeal a denial to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims — the arguments that get Board denials set aside.

What this is computed from: 30,584 decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, identified inside a 39,330-document public court-decision corpus and summarized by machine analysis. Every docket number shown below was verified to appear in the court's published decision text in that corpus (112 verified; 0 candidate examples were dropped for failing verification). Selection effect: only Board decisions a veteran chose to appeal reach the Court — most Board denials are never appealed, so these rates describe appealed cases, not all denials. Data build: 2026-08-16.

Step 1 — Respiratory at the Board

From our issue-level parse of 18,313 public Board decisions (dated 2026-01-02 to 2026-03-02; corpus ingest in progress):

Issues decided
1,824
Granted
20.5%
Denied
40.7%
Remanded
28.9%

Full Board-level tables: outcome rates by condition · judge statistics.

Step 2 — appealed denials at the Court

CAVC cases analyzed involving respiratory
2,374
Board decision disturbed
52.3% (1,241)

Arguments that won — verified dockets

CAVC docket 16-0646 · verified · denial type: no nexus

The Board failed to consider service connection under Persian Gulf War presumptions and the duty to assist required a medical nexus opinion for that theory.

CAVC docket 15-4887 · verified · denial type: unclassified

Board failed to adequately analyze whether the veteran's withdrawal of appeal was explicit, unambiguous, and done with full understanding of the consequences

CAVC docket 98-1463 · verified · denial type: credibility

Board failed in its duty to assist by not obtaining service records

CAVC docket 19-8313 · verified · denial type: not new material

Board failed to provide an adequate statement of reasons or bases for finding no new and material evidence to reopen the claims.

Argument summaries are machine-extracted from the cited public court decisions and lightly compressed; read the full decision by searching the docket number at CourtListener or the Court's own public search. A cited argument working in one record does not guarantee it fits another.

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