Imagine regaining consciousness in a hospital bed with no memory of how you arrived there—your speech halting, your body unwilling to move, your thoughts fragmented. This devastating scenario becomes reality for an estimated 69 million people each year.
Yet, despite its scale and impact, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) remains largely absent from international health frameworks. Neither the World Health Organization (WHO) nor the vast majority of its Member States recognize TBI as a chronic condition or track it through notifiable surveillance systems.
This absence is no longer defensible. The Global Coalition for TBI makes a compelling case for urgent change. The Coalition—a network of clinicians, scientists, survivors, and policymakers—has laid an evidence-based, ethically grounded roadmap.
It calls on the World Health Assembly (WHA) to take decisive steps: acknowledge TBI as a lifelong condition, establish international care standards, and designate it as a notifiable disease.
The numbers alone are staggering. Those 69 million annual cases surpass the global burden of HIV or tuberculosis. Many affected will never fully recover. TBI can derail education and employment for children and youth before either begins. For older adults, it accelerates cognitive decline and contributes to early institutionalization. In low- and middle-income countries, where road traffic injuries, armed conflict, and domestic violence prevail, TBI is common and catastrophically under-treated.
This is both a clinical challenge and a structural one. Too frequently, TBI is managed as an acute episode rather than a chronic condition with cascading physical, cognitive, and social effects. Survivors face heightened risks of homelessness, incarceration, substance use, and poverty. Families often become informal caregivers without any support. And because injuries are often invisible—no casts, no visible scars—society wrongly assumes full recovery long before true healing begins.
The economic toll is equally severe. Neurotrauma is projected to cost low- and middle-income countries over $4.4 trillion by 2030 due to lost productivity and human potential. National-level studies, such as Canada's 2023 report "Traumatic Brain Injury: A Lifelong Condition," confirm this finding: inadequate management of TBI incurs continuously escalating healthcare and social costs.
Recognizing TBI globally is essential—not only to set uniform standards of care but also to ensure international collaboration, the sharing of best practices, and equitable distribution of resources. While aligning with existing WHO frameworks, including the Intersectoral Global Action Plan on Epilepsy and Other Neurological Disorders (IGAP), TBI demands dedicated recognition, distinct surveillance protocols, and tailored care pathways. Its causes are unique, its course unpredictable, and its impacts, especially on vulnerable groups, too significant to fold into broader categories.
The prevention landscape is equally urgent. Road safety enhancements, stricter enforcement of helmet and seatbelt laws, anti-violence campaigns, and improved workplace protections can significantly reduce TBI incidence. But these measures must be supported by post-injury systems that recognize TBI as the beginning of a lifelong journey rather than an acute crisis.
Barb Butler, a Canadian TBI survivor and advocate, described her personal experience after a car accident 35 years ago: "My severe brain injury didn't just happen to me. It happened to my whole family. My husband lost his wife, and my children lost their mother. It changes everything, forever."
The WHA now faces a clear choice: continue treating TBI as an ancillary issue—folded into broad categories, unmeasured, unnoticed—or acknowledge the reality survivors already know: TBI is chronic, global, and escalating.
The Global Coalition for TBI has completed significant groundwork —presenting data, forging partnerships, and working on a resolution prepared for adoption. Pakistan’s Ministry of Health has courageously committed to sponsoring this resolution at WHA79 in 2026.
What happens next hinges on political will.
We owe action to those who have lost memories, faculties, livelihoods, and loved ones. We owe it to the millions who will sustain TBI in the coming years. We owe it to health systems worldwide, which cannot afford to treat chronic conditions as temporary crises.
It is time that traumatic brain injury steps fully into the global spotlight—recognized by the WHO, embedded in policy, and prioritized as a matter of health equity.
[All News]