Annoyingly I cannot find the actual article by searching The Journal of Pediatrics website jpeds.com/search/quick so we may never know… Apparently they’ve taken the tactic of flooding the internet with press releases that don’t even mention the name of the article.
In any event I am having a hard time seeing that helmet use data is well-reported, please see data-collection-of-bicyclist-helmet-use-in-crashes; if the data is not accurately collected and reported, studies such as these that simply mine FARS data seem really suspect.
From a press release (my emphasis): “Existing research shows that bicyclists who wear helmets have an 88 percent lower risk of brain injury, but researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital found that simply having bicycle helmet laws in place showed a 20 percent decrease in deaths and injuries for children younger than 16 who were in bicycle-motor vehicle collisions”
I think helmets are great; but it seems to me they are being over-sold. Here there is a general claim of an enormous reduction in TBI, and then further that there is a modest safety bump in JUST HAVING A LAW. hmmm. so many questions.
- what does rate mean? my guess is it’s population based; it would be far better if it were exposure based. I wouldn’t be surprised to see pediatric exposure has been declining. The study I noted at effects-of-bicycle-helmet-laws-on-childrens-injuries from National Bureau of Economic Research made more sense to me: helmet laws = less cycling = lower “rates” of death/injury mostly because most people figure rates based on population and not exposure
- obviously, what’s really more interesting is compliance rate, and not just whether or not a state has a law. plus how do they handle local laws(e.g. tucson and a few other Arizona cities have a minor helmet law, though there is no state law).
- helmet data in FARS; the last time i remember checking , there were a *lot* of “unknowns” in the helmet yes/no box. This should be pretty easy to check, at least for 2010 and 11 now that I have my own FARS database up and running.
- Another study out of Canada and published in BMJ found helmet laws had little to no effect; what they describe as an underlying baseline effect. “… the incremental contribution of provincial helmet legislation to reduce hospital admissions for head injuries seems to have been minimal.“
In case you were wondering here is the list of Arizona cities/jurisdictions that have MHLs: mandatory-bicycle-helmet-laws-in-arizona