CTE is caused by repetitive traumatic brain injuries. That means End CTE advocacy can prevent this devastating disease.

For years, members of the global sports community have refused to recognize that their sports can cause CTE, which has slowed reforms that can prevent CTE. In 2022, the Concussion Legacy Foundation and our global collaborators published a groundbreaking review of the world’s CTE research and concluded that the evidence is overwhelming that CTE is caused by repetitive head impacts. We recruited some of the most prominent global experts to co-sign a letter petitioning the National Institutes of Health to consider the evidence and update their public statement to recognize causation – and they did. They join the CDC, NHS, NFL, Football Association, and Professional Footballers’ Association in recognizing causation. Researchers and clinicians can add their name to the list by clicking here.

CLF is now engaging the global sports and scientific communities to share the latest CTE evidence and imploring them update all position papers and public-facing statements to reflect the current scientific understanding in an urgent effort to educate the public.

You can track our progress on this dashboard.

Thanks to years of research and advocacy, CTE causation is widely understood. However, many still do not realize this disease is preventable. In 2023, CLF and the BU CTE Center published the first ever CTE Prevention Protocol, a simple playbook with recommendations for reducing the number and severity of head impacts proven to cause the degenerative brain disease.

The opportunity to prevent CTE also inspired our education program Stop Hitting Kids in the Head, which aims to eliminate repetitive head impacts in youth sports. Our hope is that if we can dramatically reduce the number of head impacts in sports — and anywhere else they occur — we can make significant strides toward our mission.

Brain bank and clinical research provide our best chance to learn how we can diagnose, treat, and cure the disease by 2040. Right now, we’re funding or supporting research programs to better understand how CTE impacts women, the military community, and contact sport athletes. Through the CLF Global Brain Bank, we’re uniting researchers around the world on this shared mission. Through our Clinical Research Registry, we are connecting former athletes to clinical research studies led by top scientists. Why are we working so hard in this fight? Take it from the families below, who all lost their loved one to CTE.