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19 Yale J. Health Pol'y L. & Ethics 1 (2019-2020)

handle is hein.journals/yjhple19 and id is 1 raw text is: Diekmann et al.: The Failure of Youth Sports Concussion Laws and the Limits of Leg

The Failure of Youth Sports Concussion Laws and the
Limits of Legislating Health Education
Sydney Diekmann, Christine Egan, Carly Rasmussen & Francis X.
Shen*
Abstract:
Legislatures  have   increasingly  turned   to  education-based
strategies to address significant public health challenges, despite
unclear efficacy of statutory mandated education. In this Article,
we examine the recent and rapid adoption of youth sports
concussion laws as a lens to explore the limits of education-
based legislative intervention models. In less than 10 years, all
50 states adopted a youth sports concussion statute-and each
law mandates concussion education for coaches and/or student-
athletes. This expansive, expensive intervention was designed to
reduce concussion incidence and improve concussion care. But
based on a review of 54 peer-reviewed studies, we argue that
concussion education has not, and likely will not, produce the
desired public health outcomes. The data largely demonstrate
that, at most, concussion education can produce short-term
changes in knowledge, but that these gains are unlikely to
translate into measurable behavior changes that reduce the
incidence and risk of concussion in sport. The Article uses public
health perspectives to explore the reasons why top-down
education interventions from legislatures may fail to have their
* Sydney Diekmann, B.S. Neuroscience, University of Minnesota. Christine Egan, B.S.
Neuroscience, University of Minnesota. Carly Rasmussen, B.S. Neuroscience & B.A. Psychology,
University of Minnesota. Francis X. Shen, Professor of Law & McKnight Presidential Fellow,
University of Minnesota; Director, Shen Neurolaw Lab; Executive Director, Massachusetts General
Hospital Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior; Instructor in Psychology, Harvard Medical School
MGH Dept. of Psychiatry; Executive Director of Education & Outreach, MacArthur Foundation
Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. Contact: Walter F. Mondale Hall, 229-19th Avenue
South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, 612-625-5328, fxshen@umn.edu. Acknowledgements: Preparation
of this article was supported in part by the University of Minnesota Law School, a University of
Minnesota Grand Challenges Grant. For helpful feedback and advice, we thank members of the
Grand Challenges Grant team and the Big Ten/Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research
Collaboration. For excellent research assistance, we thank Micaela Yarosh.

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