Concussions are an extremely common injury among young children and adolescents, specifically those in contact sports. Concussions can be a relatively mild one time occurrence, or children can end up in the hospital from severe concussions and are even at risk for brain damage, effecting future brain development, if they receive multiple concussions. Treatment for concussions can be extremely expensive and time consuming, and it is vital that healthcare workers provide treatment transparency and emotional support to families. Concussions can have detrimental effects to a child's life and should be treated as such, in both the research on the effects of concussions on adolescents, and the available treatments as well as their costs and time commitments.
Dr. Caitlin Hudac et al.'s (2022) research study "Dynamic cognitive inhibition in the context of frustration: Increasing racial representation of adolescent athletes using mobile community-engaged EEG methods," utilized a mobile EEG procedure in order to make participation easier and more accessible for Black adolescents, and understanding and removing that costs of transportation, missing school, and other burdens that are often overlooked when designing a study. In relation to specific effects of concussion on cognitive inhibition, Hudac et al. (2022) discovered that the induction of negative affect was less effective at impacting cognitive inhibition in athletes who had a previous history of concussion. These preliminary results provide evidence towards the cognitive impact of concussions on cognitive inhibition and modulating responses (Hudac et al., 2022). Thus, adolescents who previously had concussions are at risk for lasting effects on cognitive inhibition, and adolescents with multiple concussion injuries are at an extreme risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which significantly decreases one's life expectancy.
Dr. Hudac et al.'s (2022) study struck a question about the impact of concussion treatments for adolescents on both them and their families in regard to the financial burden, time commitment, and overall familial distress of the hospital visits. Dr. Graves and colleagues' study, "Family Hardship Following Youth Concussion: Beyond the Medical Bills," sought to look at just that. Dr. Graves and colleagues performed a study in which they asked eighteen adolescents diagnosed with a concussion and sixteen parents of those children open-ended questions about their experience with concussion care, recovery, and the cost (Graves et al., 2020). The parents and adolescents in this study noted the difficulty of gaining insurance coverage and the out of pocket medical expenses, as well as the transition back to school after being absent due to concussion recovery time, with some families having to pay for extra tutoring for their child. Traveling time and cost of gas was mentioned by several participants; some families had to travel around 55 miles each way in order to reach specialty clinics for their child's treatment. Parents in this study also mentioned having to take time off work whether that was utilizing their sick leave, vacation time, or leave without pay (Graves et al., 2020).
Therefore, it is important that we are not only utilizing community-engaged research methods to encompass a more diverse research pool and allow for more diverse data on injuries such as concussions, like in Hudac et al.'s (2022) study, but that healthcare should also seek to move towards family-centered care and nurses and other medical staff should consider a more diverse range of familial distress and burdens that come with treatment, as seen in Graves et al.'s (2020) study. It is imperative that the severity of concussions is addressed in future research, as the implications of adolescents with concussions receiving no treatment, due to economic and familial costs, are severe and detrimental to their wellbeing and their future. Brain development is extremely fragile during young childhood to adolescence, so it is vital that healthcare and treatment accessibility is acknowledged by healthcare professionals to better serve their patients by being more transparent and providing a higher level of emotional support and treatment alternatives (Graves et al., 2020). Every year millions of children and adolescents receive concussion diagnoses, so both the research on concussions and their effects on brain development and cognitive inhibition, and the availability, accessibility, and transparency of treatment should be diverse based on familial burdens and inclusive of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
References
Graves, J.M., Moore, M., Kehoe, L., Li, M., Chan, A., Conrick, K., Williams-Gilbert, W., & Vavilala, M.S.(2020). Family Hardship Following Youth Concussion: Beyond the Medical Bills. Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 51, 15-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedn.2019.11.016
Hudac, C.M., Wallace, J.S., Ward, V.R., Friedman, N.R., Delfin, D., & Newman, S.D. (2022). Dynamic cognitive inhibition in the context of frustration: Increasing racial representation of adolescent athletes using mobile community-engaged EEG methods. Frontiers in Neurology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2022.918075
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