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The Defense Health Agency Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence hosted the 2026 Annual Brain Health Symposium March 18, featuring presentations and the latest research across warfighter brain health.
In her opening remarks, Dr. Katie Stout, the center's division chief, said research presented at the symposium is aimed at advancing military medicine to mitigate brain exposures and “provide long-term protection for service members, both in deployed and garrison environments” to keep warfighters lethal.
Military medical leaders briefed the Warfighter Brain Health Initiative which prioritizes providing high-quality care to all beneficiaries, working across the active duty, National Guard and Reserve components, and combatant commands to deliver integrated joint warfighting capabilities, and enhanced battlefield brain health assessment and treatment capabilities
Looking ahead to improved warfighter brain health
Opening the symposium, Kathy Lee, director of Warfighter Brain Health Policy in the office of the deputy assistant secretary of war for health affairs, defined warfighter brain health as the “physical, psychological, and cognitive status that affects a warfighter’s capacity to function adaptively in any operational environment and impacts readiness, operational capability, and the goal to achieve, overmatch, or superior lethality.”
Lee outlined key developments in the Department of War’s Warfighter Brain Health initiative:
According to Lee, revising the initiative is “necessary to be agile and adaptive to evolving threats and operational environments.”
Lee said the focus of Warfighter Brain Health 2.0 will consolidate lines of effort to further focusing on an agile fighting force, maximize readiness and lethality by optimizing brain health and performance, recognizing and mitigating brain health risk, and protecting and treating warfighters.
“How do we do this?” Lee explained it takes engaging “communities of interest.”
“To continue to set conditions for success, we need engagement from multiple communities — such as the safety community, the acquisition community (weapons, information technology), training, the intelligence community, are obviously critical,” she said, adding the partnerships will need “intelligence information to provide emerging threat sources and environments that can negatively affect brain health and performance.”
Working with these communities “through policy, data streams, education and communication, as well as research,” are all vital for the initiative’s goals, she added.
Before the refreshed initiative launches, Lee said, “stakeholder feedback from Warfighter Brain Health 1.0 is absolutely critical” and will include soliciting input from service members with various experiences.
“We want to make sure we're meeting the mark based on feedback with different levels of how long somebody's been in the military,” Lee said, stressing the importance of including service members who newly joined as well as mid and late-career warfighters.
Lee explained “they may be deciding if they're going to stay in the military and didn’t have a program like this in the very beginning when they entered into the force,” she said. “We're trying to make sure that we are addressing the needs throughout a warfighter’s career.”
TBI screening for battlefield readiness
Lt. Col. (Dr.) Bradley Dengler, director of the Military Traumatic Brain Injury Initiative at Uniformed Services University, presented research based on data collected from over 17 years of conflict showing 68% of service members with mild TBI were evacuated from the battlefield.
Dengler said many widely accepted methods for TBI screening in operational environments required technology-dependent testing that prompted an evacuation from the battlefield. Evacuation “of people back in major ground warfare was a luxury in OIR (Operation Inherent Resolve) and OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) but going forward (it’s) not going to be anymore,” he stressed.
“We looked at how fast these tests can be done,” Dengler said. He explained while some tests may be highly accurate, they are not practical for far-forward environments if they are time-consuming to complete and rely on computers for data analysis.
To find a better solution, Dengler’s team assembled a steering committee of TBI experts to evaluate the available methods for making real-time, return-to-duty decisions at the point of injury. Dengler emphasized tests need to be objective to prevent individuals from memorizing answers or embellishing poor performance.
The committee’s preliminary findings favor several rapid screening methods, with some assessments derived from sports medicine and field sobriety tests. For use in far-forward environments, the recommendations favor visual exams with minimal or no technology required, including:
Dengler spoke to the potential for smart-phone technology integration into far-forward TBI screening as an overall goal but emphasized more data is needed and methods requiring no technology can be more reliably used in operational environments.
Overview:
Additional presentations covered topics including:
At the foundation of the DOW’s joint, integrated effort to understand more about the brain and enhance treating brain injuries, is reducing risks of injury for keep warfighters in the fight, said Lee.
“We must ramp up our knowledge base so we can maximize brain protection strategies for service members and further advance our health care delivery system in a way that allows earlier intervention to keep them healthy and ready and able to enjoy a high quality of life post military service.”
| Date Taken: | 04.21.2026 |
| Date Posted: | 04.21.2026 10:57 |
| Story ID: | 563216 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 32 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Pioneers in warfighter brain health discuss research agenda at annual brain health symposium, by Andrew Ortuzar, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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