A new legislative proposal in the Senate, should it become law, could be a bonafide game changer for veteran health, while serving as a bulwark against the scourge of suicide that afflicts veterans.
The Precision Brain Health Research Act of 2025 seeks to identify and research critical brain health issues among veterans suffering from repetitive low-level blast exposures sustained during military service.
The effort would be a major development in the long battle to get the federal government to focus once and for all on the long-term effects of brain injuries induced by low-level blast exposure. These types of injuries are often categorized as so-called mild traumatic brain injuries, an unfortunate misnomer that does not capture the breadth of damage they can cause.
Low-level blast exposure is commonplace in the military. Even firing a weapon in training can expose service members to the effects of blast waves, which can then result in brain injuries.
Military-related brain injuries are “random and unpredictable, ranging from a single injury to many thousands of traumatic injuries over similar time periods depending on an individual’s chance exposure to blasts and impacts,” researchers reported in the Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. Mild traumatic brain injuries are “the most common traumatic brain injury affecting military personnel; however, it is the most difficult to diagnose and the least well understood,” researchers said.
What’s more, the connection between brain injury and suicide is powerful. As the VA noted in its 2020 annual report on suicide among veterans, “Veterans Health Administration patients who died by suicide are more likely to have sleep disorders, traumatic brain injury or a pain diagnosis than other VHA patients.”
The gaping hole in care for veterans is that neither the Department of Veterans Affairs nor the military has comprehensively studied the impact of repetitive low-level blast injuries on an individual’s health.
The legislation would direct such an assessment by requiring the VA to develop with the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine a 10-year research plan on the effects of repetitive low-level blast injuries. As part of that, it would also require the VA and the military services to establish a data-sharing partnership so that the health of service members with low-level repetitive blast injuries can be better tracked after leaving the service.
The data in turn would allow the VA to better and more quickly share those treatments resulting in positive outcomes for patients with repetitive blast injuries. And it will identify those military specialties and units that experience higher levels of low-level repetitive blast injuries, so that the military services can better mitigate blast injuries at the beginning of a service member’s stint.
The hope is that the program will aid in the clarity and specificity of a diagnosis for any given veteran. That’s essential because brain injuries are often misdiagnosed as mental health ailments.
The success of this effort rests on the foundation of quality data gathering. The timing of the legislation is fortuitous, as both the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs are vastly improving their data-gathering and data-assessing capabilities with new electronic health records systems.
The Department of Defense system is in place, while the VA’s, currently in a handful of VA centers, is being rolled out over the next several years. As the VA notes, its new electronic health record system provides VA centers with innovative data analytics and care management tools that allow care teams greater insights into a veteran’s health issues.
“Research has linked low-level blasts, which servicemembers are exposed to during training and in combat, to increased occurrences of brain injuries, mental health conditions and suicides,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
If enacted, the legislation “will help us better understand why and how blast injuries are impacting veterans’ mental health and make certain VA is able to quickly incorporate these findings into care for veterans and enable them to receive an accurate diagnosis and treatment plan,” he added.
It’s an important development — and long, long overdue.
Frank Larkin is former U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms and current chief operating officer of Warrior Call, a suicide prevention non-profit focused on U.S. veterans.
