--- title: Almost Half of Homeless Men Had Previous Brain Injury, Study Says description: Traumatic brain injuries have long-term effects doctors are just discovering. A study suggests there could be a connection to homelessness canonical: https://time.com/77757/almost-half-of-homeless-men-had-a-previous-brain-injury/ author: Bryan Walsh article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-04-26T12:00:49.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-21T07:30:52.638Z article:section: Health og:title: Almost half of homeless men had brain injury in the past og:description: Traumatic brain injuries may be connected to homelessness og:url: https://time.com/77757/almost-half-of-homeless-men-had-a-previous-brain-injury/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e1d52d58e3e9d44/69868ca113c79f8409191d13/140425-homeless.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 140425-homeless og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Almost half of homeless men had brain injury in the past twitter:description: Traumatic brain injuries may be connected to homelessness twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e1d52d58e3e9d44/69868ca113c79f8409191d13/140425-homeless.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Almost Half of Homeless Men Had a Previous Brain Injury  by [Bryan Walsh](https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/)  ## Bryan Walsh Apr 26, 2014 12:00 PM UTC  Past traumatic brain injuries were correlated with homelessness Past traumatic brain injuries were correlated with homelessnessGetty Images  by [Bryan Walsh](https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/)  ## Bryan Walsh Apr 26, 2014 12:00 PM UTC Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) happen in a moment: a jarring collision while playing sports, an accidental fall, a sudden bomb blast. But their effects can last for a lifetime. Cognition and decisionmaking abilities can be damaged. Mood and behavior can shift suddenly, sometimes resulting in increased aggression or reduced motivation. While most people who suffer a TBI will be able to continue on with their lives unchanged, a subset of victims are never the same. The trajectory of their life is altered permanently. Just how altered isn’t clear, but a new [study](http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/2/E69.full) published in the journal _CMAJ Open_ offers some sobering data about a possible connection between TBI and homelessness. Jane Topolovec-Vranic, a researcher in trauma and neurosurgery at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, surveyed 111 homeless men recruited from a city shelter to see whether they had suffered a TBI sometime in their past. She found that 45% of them had experienced a traumatic brain injury at some point in their life. (Sadly, most of her subjects’ TBIs resulted from assault.) “You could see how it would happen,” she says. “You have a concussion, and you can’t concentrate or focus. Their thinking abilities and personalities change. They can’t manage at work, and they may lose their job, and eventually lose their families. And then it’s a negative spiral” — a spiral that, for the men in Topolovec-Vranic’s study, ends up in a homeless shelter. There’s no clear data on how prevalent TBI is in the general population, which makes it difficult to say for sure whether the homeless men in Topolovec-Vranic’s study were injured at an unusually high rate. Hers was also a small study, which limits any larger conclusions about the connection between TBI and homelessness. But the more we learn about the long-term effects of TBI, the more worrying such injuries become. Another [study](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/22/study-says-half-of-jailed-nyc-teens-have-history-of-brain-injury.html) recently published in the _Journal of Adolescent Health_ found that nearly half of all newly admitted adolescents to the New York penal system had a history of TBI. Studies have also shown that military veterans who suffered a TBI are more likely to commit suicide than those who didn’t. Our brains are extraordinary machines, and we now know that they continue to change throughout our lives — for the better and, sometimes in the case of TBI, for the worse. Homelessness is sad enough in its own right, but the thought that a single traumatic brain injury could make that fate more likely is truly tragic. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/77757/almost-half-of-homeless-men-had-a-previous-brain-injury/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/77757/almost-half-of-homeless-men-had-a-previous-brain-injury/"},"headline":"Almost Half of Homeless Men Had a Previous Brain Injury","datePublished":"2014-04-26T12:00:49.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-21T07:30:52.638Z","description":"A new study of homeless men found that 45% of the subjects surveyed had experienced traumatic brain injuries in the past. 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