Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): Overview of Diagnosis and Treatment

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common, preventable, and disabling health condition with heterogeneous aetiology, type, severity, and outcomes. Ongoing challenges in TBI care are reflected by rapidly growing literature in the prevention, assessment and treatment of TBI, especially in sports concussion and blast-related TBI. Recent advances include TBI modelling, to predict outcomes of TBI and to improve future data collection, by the International Mission on Prognosis and Analysis of randomized Controlled Trials in TBI (IMPACT) [1] and Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury pilot (TRACK-TBI) [2], respectively. In comparison, there is a lack of clarity and standardization in the diagnostic criteria, severity grading, and nomenclature to describe TBI, which could improve many aspects of TBI care, especially in developing targeted therapies for TBI [3,4]. TBI is currently defined as ‘an alteration in brain function, or other evidence of brain pathology, caused by an external force’ [5].