[ed. See also, this Duck Soup post: Are Cycle Helmets Really Useful?]
About a year ago my 14-year-old daughter needed a new bicycle helmet. Her skull and level of sophistication had both outgrown her old pink flowery one. We paid a visit to the local bike shop. On a far wall our options were stacked five high and 10 wide: multivented Specialized models, slick red and black designs by Giro, brightly colored versions manufactured by Bell. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the prices, which ranged from $40 to $120.
"Do any of these provide better protection than the others?" I asked the guy working the floor. "Does price reflect safety?"
I trust the guy working the floor. Over the years he's sold me tubes, tires, lube, shoes, gloves. He knows his merchandise.
"Not really," he said. "They all pass the same certification test." The difference, he told us, is in style, fit, comfort, and ventilation.
That struck me as odd. We live in an age of near-comical product differentiation. You can buy cough syrup in 14 formulas, coffee in dozens of permutations. Yet when it comes to bike helmets, I later learned, we're all wearing decorative versions of the same Model T: a thick foam liner (actually expanded polystyrene, or EPS) attached to a thin plastic outer shell. The basic setup hasn't changed much since the first one was sold in 1975.
That classic design deserves serious plaudits. The $40 helmet is one of the great success stories of the past half-century. Like seat belts, air bags, and smoke detectors, bike helmets save countless lives every year. They do a stellar job of preventing catastrophic skull fractures, plus dings and scrapes from low-hanging tree branches and other common nuisances.
But what about concussions? A friend of mine, Sheilagh Griffin, commutes on her bike and races cyclocross on weekends. During a recent race she had lost control and flown over the bar. Though she'd been wearing a helmet, headaches plagued her for the next few days. Her doctor diagnosed a concussion. Twenty years ago that wasn't such a big deal. It was a shake-it-off injury. You popped two aspirin and saddled up again the next day.
That has changed. Sheilagh's doctor told her to stop racing until the headaches subsided. And then sit out for one or two more weeks, to decrease the odds of a vastly more problematic second concussion. (...)
Standing in the shop, my thoughts turned to my daughter's precious brain. Most of us reflexively strap on helmets assuming they'll protect us. But how well do they actually do the job? I wanted to know if the technology and design of the headwear had kept up with our growing understanding of what goes on inside our skulls. I started asking questions.
Over the past year I toured helmet labs, interviewed brain researchers and government regulators, and pored over dusty volumes in medical archives. What I found was troubling.
Statistics don't tell the whole story, but they're a good place to start.
Stat #1: More people are riding. Between 1995 and 2009, the annual number of bike trips in the United States grew by 30 percent, and the number of daily bike commuters grew by 60 percent.
Stat #2: Despite that growth, until recently bicycle-traffic deaths were declining. From 1995 to 1997, an average of 804 cyclists in the United States died every year in motor-vehicle crashes. During an equivalent three-year period from 2008 to 2010, that average fell to 655. The number went up in 2011, but there's evidence that cycling is becoming safer. That's partly a result of more bike lanes and other infrastructure, and partly because more riders make roads safer for cyclists. But at least some of the decline can be attributed to helmet use. By 1999 half of all riders were wearing them—up from just 18 percent eight years earlier—and that figure almost certainly increased as many cities passed mandatory-helmet laws. (No reliable survey on helmet use has been published since 1999.)
Here's the trouble. Stat #3: As more people buckled on helmets, brain injuries also increased. Between 1997 and 2011 the number of bike-related concussions suffered annually by American riders increased by 67 percent, from 9,327 to 15,546, according to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a yearly sampling of hospital emergency rooms conducted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
Of course, concussions are more readily diagnosed now than they were 15 years ago. That likely accounts for some of the increase. It's also possible that some of the 149 fewer riders killed every year survived to get lumped into the brain-injury category. But that still leaves thousands unaccounted for. We're left with this stark statistical fact: The concussion rate among bicycle riders has grown faster than the sport.
About a year ago my 14-year-old daughter needed a new bicycle helmet. Her skull and level of sophistication had both outgrown her old pink flowery one. We paid a visit to the local bike shop. On a far wall our options were stacked five high and 10 wide: multivented Specialized models, slick red and black designs by Giro, brightly colored versions manufactured by Bell. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the prices, which ranged from $40 to $120.
"Do any of these provide better protection than the others?" I asked the guy working the floor. "Does price reflect safety?"I trust the guy working the floor. Over the years he's sold me tubes, tires, lube, shoes, gloves. He knows his merchandise.
"Not really," he said. "They all pass the same certification test." The difference, he told us, is in style, fit, comfort, and ventilation.
That struck me as odd. We live in an age of near-comical product differentiation. You can buy cough syrup in 14 formulas, coffee in dozens of permutations. Yet when it comes to bike helmets, I later learned, we're all wearing decorative versions of the same Model T: a thick foam liner (actually expanded polystyrene, or EPS) attached to a thin plastic outer shell. The basic setup hasn't changed much since the first one was sold in 1975.
That classic design deserves serious plaudits. The $40 helmet is one of the great success stories of the past half-century. Like seat belts, air bags, and smoke detectors, bike helmets save countless lives every year. They do a stellar job of preventing catastrophic skull fractures, plus dings and scrapes from low-hanging tree branches and other common nuisances.
But what about concussions? A friend of mine, Sheilagh Griffin, commutes on her bike and races cyclocross on weekends. During a recent race she had lost control and flown over the bar. Though she'd been wearing a helmet, headaches plagued her for the next few days. Her doctor diagnosed a concussion. Twenty years ago that wasn't such a big deal. It was a shake-it-off injury. You popped two aspirin and saddled up again the next day.
That has changed. Sheilagh's doctor told her to stop racing until the headaches subsided. And then sit out for one or two more weeks, to decrease the odds of a vastly more problematic second concussion. (...)
Standing in the shop, my thoughts turned to my daughter's precious brain. Most of us reflexively strap on helmets assuming they'll protect us. But how well do they actually do the job? I wanted to know if the technology and design of the headwear had kept up with our growing understanding of what goes on inside our skulls. I started asking questions.
Over the past year I toured helmet labs, interviewed brain researchers and government regulators, and pored over dusty volumes in medical archives. What I found was troubling.
Statistics don't tell the whole story, but they're a good place to start.
Stat #1: More people are riding. Between 1995 and 2009, the annual number of bike trips in the United States grew by 30 percent, and the number of daily bike commuters grew by 60 percent.
Stat #2: Despite that growth, until recently bicycle-traffic deaths were declining. From 1995 to 1997, an average of 804 cyclists in the United States died every year in motor-vehicle crashes. During an equivalent three-year period from 2008 to 2010, that average fell to 655. The number went up in 2011, but there's evidence that cycling is becoming safer. That's partly a result of more bike lanes and other infrastructure, and partly because more riders make roads safer for cyclists. But at least some of the decline can be attributed to helmet use. By 1999 half of all riders were wearing them—up from just 18 percent eight years earlier—and that figure almost certainly increased as many cities passed mandatory-helmet laws. (No reliable survey on helmet use has been published since 1999.)
Here's the trouble. Stat #3: As more people buckled on helmets, brain injuries also increased. Between 1997 and 2011 the number of bike-related concussions suffered annually by American riders increased by 67 percent, from 9,327 to 15,546, according to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a yearly sampling of hospital emergency rooms conducted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
Of course, concussions are more readily diagnosed now than they were 15 years ago. That likely accounts for some of the increase. It's also possible that some of the 149 fewer riders killed every year survived to get lumped into the brain-injury category. But that still leaves thousands unaccounted for. We're left with this stark statistical fact: The concussion rate among bicycle riders has grown faster than the sport.
by Bruce Barcott, Bicycling | Read more:
Photo: Jonathan Sprague
