The Zackery Lystedt Brain Project will be announced at the Super Bowl, The New York Times reported Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/sports/31concussions.html?ref=sports
The Lystedt initiative, lead by the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation and the American College of Sports Medicine, will push to convince more states to pass legislation protecting young sports players from concussions and their after effects.
Washington and Oregon enacted the first concussion-specific laws related to concussion protection for school athletes. The law that Washington passed is named after Zackery Lysedt, who sustained serous brain injury in 2006 playing football, according to The Times.
The Washington legislation has become a model for other states. The law requires that coaches be educated on concussions; that players be taken off the field immediately if it’s suspected they’ve sustained a concussion; and that a doctor must clear an athlete before he or she can return to play.
There could be as many as two dozen states that may pass laws related to concussions and youth sports, The Times says. Florida, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts have bills in the works.
A House Judiciary Committee forum, the third one, will be held Monday, Feb. 1, in Houston to discuss brain injuries in football.
There have been two prior committee meetings, which discussed the poor treatment of concussions by the NFL. The league responded by adopting some new rules, including one that bans players suspected of having a concussion from returning to a game or practice.
Editor’s Note: You cannot tell the difference between a mild concussion and a serious concussion until you wait hours. While there is arguably a cost benefit analysis to returning the quarterback of an NFL team to the game, there is no cost to holding out a scholastic player from that game. This is especially true because there will is no guarantee of a sideline medical professional trained to clear the player. But as brain injury is a process not an event that takes a minimum of 24 hours to fully manifest itself, any return is risky. Sit the injured player and test them the next day, when you can give a sensitive test for amnesia. See http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney%22%3Ehttp://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney%3C/a#p/u/11/dEWHgwRywtY
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