UCLA hosts first Brain Health Summit as 180 million Americans face brain disorders

More than 180 million Americans live with disorders of the brain and nervous system. That figure - drawn from a 2025 study in JAMA Neurology - makes neurological, neurodevelopmental, and mental health conditions the leading cause of disability in the country, ahead of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes. Yet federal funding for neuroscience research has declined significantly since 2023.

UCLA Health is hosting its first Brain Health Summit on March 20-21, 2026, an attempt to bridge the gap between the scale of the problem and the current response. The event brings together neuroscientists, policymakers, philanthropists, and community advocates in Los Angeles, with a free livestream available globally.

A funding crisis meets growing momentum

The timing is deliberate. Federal cuts to neuroscience research have forced universities, state governments, and private philanthropy to absorb a growing share of the financial burden. But the retreat of federal dollars has been partially offset by new sources of investment that would have seemed unlikely a few years ago.

Texas voters approved a historic $3 billion allocation to brain disease research in 2025 - a state-level commitment that dwarfs most university endowments in the field. Meanwhile, brain economy frameworks have gained traction at the World Economic Forum in Davos, reflecting an emerging consensus that cognitive health carries economic implications well beyond healthcare budgets. Lost productivity, caregiving costs, and disability payments from neurological conditions impose massive economic burdens that traditional health metrics tend to undercount.

The UCLA summit is positioned as the first event to bring these traditionally separate conversations into the same room. Neurologists sitting alongside pediatricians. Aging specialists next to childhood neurodevelopment researchers. Scientists alongside arts practitioners and patients. The organizers are betting that cross-pollination between these siloed fields will produce insights that no single discipline would generate alone.

Sessions spanning the full lifespan

The summit's programming covers brain health from childhood through old age, reflecting a field-wide shift toward viewing neurological health as a lifelong continuum rather than a set of discrete diseases.

Policy and funding sessions will examine what states, philanthropy, and the private sector are doing as federal research investment retreats. The Texas ballot measure will likely feature prominently, as will models for public-private research partnerships that could be replicated elsewhere. The question of whether state-level funding can adequately replace federal investment - or whether it creates a patchwork system where research capacity depends on geography - is likely to surface.

Technology and AI sessions will explore artificial intelligence's role in cognitive health, from diagnostic imaging to personalized treatment planning. Kana Enomoto of the McKinsey Health Institute will deliver a keynote on human cognitive advantage in the age of AI - a topic that sits at the intersection of brain health and economic competitiveness, asking what happens to human cognitive capital when machines take over more intellectual labor.

Modifiable lifestyle factors - sleep, breathwork, nutrition, and exercise - will receive dedicated attention. The evidence base for lifestyle interventions in brain health has grown substantially in recent years, but translating population-level research into individual behavior change remains a persistent challenge. These sessions aim to bridge the gap between what studies show and what clinicians can practically recommend.

Sessions on brain health in childhood will address neurodevelopmental disorders and early environmental exposures - a topic that has gained urgency as rates of ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and learning disabilities have risen across multiple countries. Whether this reflects better diagnosis, genuine increases in prevalence, or both, the implications for educational systems and pediatric care are substantial.

Perhaps the most unconventional programming involves art, music, dance, and creativity as tools in neurological care. The evidence for arts-based interventions in conditions like Parkinson's disease, traumatic brain injury, and dementia has grown from anecdotal to increasingly rigorous, with clinical trials demonstrating measurable benefits in motor function, mood, and cognitive engagement. Jake Broder of the Global Brain Health Institute, a playwright whose work Unraveled addresses neurological disease, represents this intersection of creative practice and clinical evidence.

The roster of speakers

The summit's speaker list spans clinical medicine, policy, and research leadership. Daniel Geschwind, Senior Dean and Vice Chancellor for Precision Medicine at UCLA, brings a genetics-driven perspective on neurological disease. Steven Lewis, President of the World Federation of Neurology, offers a global view of brain health priorities. Jack Feldman, Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience at UCLA, is known for his work on the neural control of breathing - research with direct clinical applications in sleep disorders and respiratory failure.

Harris Eyre of Rice University's Global Brain Economy Initiative represents the economic framing of brain health, while Dilip Jeste, past president of the American Psychiatric Association and director of the Global Research Network on Social Determinants of Mental Health and Exposomics, brings expertise on how social conditions shape mental health outcomes. Steve Carnevale, Commissioner of the California Commission on Behavioral Health, adds a state policy perspective.

Patient and caregiver perspectives are also programmed, an inclusion that reflects a broader trend in medical conferences toward centering the experience of people living with the conditions under discussion. Whether this translates to meaningful influence on research priorities or remains a symbolic gesture varies widely across medical events.

Measuring brain health at the national level

One of the more ambitious items on the summit agenda is the development of a national Brain Health Index. The concept - a standardized metric that could track population-level brain health over time, comparable to measures like life expectancy or infant mortality - doesn't currently exist. Building one would require consensus on what to measure (cognitive function, mental health prevalence, neurological disease burden, educational attainment, or some combination), how to collect data at scale, and how to account for demographic and socioeconomic variation.

If achieved, such an index could provide policymakers with a simple, communicable metric for advocating brain health investment. It could also expose disparities - between regions, age groups, racial and ethnic communities - that are currently obscured by fragmented data systems. But the technical and political challenges are substantial, and the summit is more likely to advance the conversation than to produce a finished product.

What the summit can and cannot accomplish

A two-day conference, however well-curated, cannot solve the structural underfunding of neuroscience research or close the gap between treatment advances and clinical implementation. Summits are better at generating visibility, building networks, and aligning stakeholders than at producing concrete policy outcomes.

The value of this particular event may lie in its breadth. Brain health advocacy has historically been fragmented by diagnosis - Alzheimer's organizations lobbying separately from Parkinson's groups, mental health advocates working in parallel with neurologists. The UCLA summit's decision to treat brain health as a unified field, spanning conditions, life stages, and disciplines, is a strategic choice that could strengthen collective advocacy.

The free livestream, available at youtube.com/live/GiUU8gerE3g with no registration required, makes the event accessible beyond the in-person audience at UCLA's Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center. For researchers, clinicians, and advocates who can't travel to Los Angeles, this lowers the barrier to participation - though remote viewing obviously lacks the networking opportunities that make in-person events most valuable.

The summit takes place March 20-21, 2026, at 425 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles. The full schedule is available at the UCLA Longevity Center website.