Soldiers are more likely than their civilian peers to die by suicide. Many people wrongly believe this is because of combat trauma, but in fact the most vulnerable group are soldiers who have never deployed. The Army’s suicide rate has risen steadily even in peacetime, and the numbers now exceed total combat deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A Times investigation into the death of Specialist Austin Valley, stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas, found that mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.

Concussions are the most common form of brain injury with thousands of Canadians diagnosed every year. In 2022, approximately 35,000 children and youth, aged 5 to 19, and more than 65,000 adults, 20 years and older, were diagnosed with a concussion in emergency rooms across the country. In the summer of 2022, the Public Health Agency of Canada launched the Detecting Concussions Using Objective Indicatorschallenge, seeking solutions to prevent severe health outcomes associated with concussions. As part of phase 1, three finalists received $150,000 each to develop their ideas.

When 42-year-old Myrthe Boss gets on her bike to go shopping in the Dutch town of Ede, she pops on a helmet. This act, considered essential in many countries, marks Boss out as something of a radical in the Netherlands, where helmet-wearing is rare. Now, however, faced with rising number of traffic deaths linked in particular to older riders and e-bikes, the Dutch government and provinces – not to mention neurologists like Boss – are inviting cyclists to think again.

Last week’s decision by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee not to recommend MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) surprised and dismayed many in psychedelic research. The field has exploded in recent years after decades of being shunned by academia and stifled by governments. But the first company to submit clinical trial data for U.S. market approval, Lykos Therapeutics, could not convince the panel of independent experts that its approach—combining talk therapy with the compound commonly known as ecstasy—was effective, or that the benefits outweighed the risks.

A team of Australia's leading health researchers has developed a new "dictionary" to better predict outcomes for people who have experienced a moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The work is published in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

A test used to gauge whether a college athlete has suffered a concussion is right only half the time and may be useless, new research finds. The test used by the NCAA, which oversees college sports, measures an athlete's cognitive skills, and is one of three tests (symptoms and balance tests being the other two) that doctors use to identify concussion.

U.S. soldiers were almost nine times more likely to die by suicide than by enemy fire, according to a Pentagon study for the five-year period ending in 2019. The study, published in May by the Defense Health Agency, found that suicide was the leading cause of death among active-duty soldiers from 2014 to 2019. There were 883 suicide deaths during that time period. Accidents were the No. 2 cause with 814 deaths. There were 96 combat deaths.

In a recent study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers evaluated the associations between psychiatric service dog partnership and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among veterans.

Cognitive health becomes an important factor in our quality of life as we get older. And even though cognitive decline is usually associated with advanced age, it turns out that what our brains go through when we're young can come back to haunt us later in life.  A new study published in the Neurology journal shows that suffering from concussions is linked to increased cognitive decline later in life, even if it was just once and if the patient was observed to have made a full recovery. 

Findings from unprecedented analysis point to how genetics may be partly why post-traumatic stress disorder is twice as prevalent among women than men.