Helmets reduce head injury severity
Bike safety Bicycle riders without a helmet are almost six times more likely to suffer a severe head injury than a helmeted rider, a new Australian study shows.
The finding adds to growing evidence supporting mandatory helmet laws.
Australia is one of the few countries in the world with mandatory helmet laws for bicycle and motorcycle riders.
The research, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia looks at the protective effect of helmets by examining the link between severe head injury in an accident and helmet use.
Lead author Dr Michael Dinh from the University of Sydney and his team based their findings on a study of 348 patients aged over 15 years admitted to seven Sydney trauma hospitals in the 12 months from July 2008.
The team found cyclists without helmets were 5.6 times more likely to suffer any head injury than cyclists wearing a helmet and 5.5 times more likely to suffer a severe head injury.
For motorcyclists the benefit of helmet wearing was not as marked as those without helmets were only 2.2 times more likely to suffer any head injury than motorcyclists with helmets and just 3.5 times more likely to suffer a severe head injury.
"The protective effect of helmet use with respect to head injury prevention therefore appears to be greater in pedal cyclists compared with motorcyclists," the team writes.
Higher hospital costs
The study also finds the cost of hospital treatment of patients with severe head injuries is three times higher for non-helmeted cyclists.
For the 50 patients with severe head injury, inhospital costs in non-helmeted patients ranged from a median of $72,000 compared with compared with helmeted patients' treatment which averaged $24,000.
Although the study authors admit their findings are limited by the small sample size, the paper also suggests younger male riders are less likely to wear a helmet in both bicycle and motorcycle categories.
The average age of a helmet-wearing bicycle rider was 41, while non-helmet cyclists were on average 35 years. Among motorcycle riders the average age for helmet wearing was 31 compared with 25 years for those who did not wear a helmet.
Co-author Associate Professor Kate Curtis, also of the University of Sydney, says the study highlights the need for better data collection in relation to trauma injuries.
"The study only looked at people who made it to hospital with major injuries," she says adding more minor injuries and accidents went unrecorded.
"It is hard to develop policy and do targeted programs and know where to spend money when we just don't know [what the need is]."
The effectiveness of mandatory helmet laws is also the topic of a US study presented today at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Washington DC.
The study, by Dr William Meehan, of the Micheli Centre for Sports Injury Prevention in the US, compares injury and death rates of US bicycle riders younger than 16 years in US states with mandatory helmet laws and those without.
His team found states with mandatory helmet laws had significantly lower rates of fatalities/incapacitation injuries after bicycle-motor vehicle collisions than those without (2 per million versus 2.5 per million).
Currently only 21 US States and the District of Columbia have laws requiring cyclists to wear helmets.