It might be time to let cooler heads prevail after mild traumatic brain injury or concussion.

Few conditions in medicine have garnered more recent interest in the lay press than mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) or concussion. For decades, investigation into the pathobiology and therapy of TBI has often been viewed by the neuroscience community as “too messy to understand” or “lacking a clear relationship between anatomical injury and behavioral consequences” and has been carried out largely by a limited number of dedicated investigative groups, primarily (albeit not exclusively) focused on the challenging problem of severe TBI. However, the acute and sub-acute consequences of mTBI in settings such as sports concussion or combat casualty care have been recognized to represent an enormous public health problem, and the recent realization thatmTBI and/or repetitivemTBImay serve as occult triggers to the development or exacerbation of a number of important conditions across the spectrumof neurodegenerative disease includingAlzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and possibly others, has produced a maelstrom of interest and both pre-clinical and clinical investigation that–for the field of TBI—is long overdue (DeKosky et al., 2013; Robertson et al., 2014; Skolnick et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2013; Kochanek et al, 2015). This epiphany in the field of mTBI has produced a golden age of investigationwithmanynew realizations, and exciting potential opportunities to develop novel therapies, and has been driven in part by a welcome surge in financial support for this research particularly from both the United States Army, and the National Institutes of Health (Diaz-Arrastia et al., 2014a,b; Kochanek et al., 2011; McMahon et al., 2014). There is, thus, new hope for the successful development of novel therapies across the severity and phenotypic spectra of TBI that will reduce the acute and chronic morbidity, and/or mortality that is currently observed, and also for the identification of therapies that might stop chronic neurodegenerative diseases from developing after TBI. In this issue of Experimental Neurology, Titus and co-workers (Titus et al., 2015), from the laboratory of Dr. Dalton Dietrich, who has been a leading investigator in the area of hypothermia in experimental brain injury for decades, provide us with another logical, simple, and somewhat frightening observation in mTBI—yet one that might have considerable clinical consequence.