The CycleChat Helmet Debate Thread

[mjr]

I would always wear a helmet when going out on my pushbike. The risk is too great not to, drivers seem to be less forgiving

Cycle helmets do not protect against drivers.

The way I see it .. bones can heal .. brain damage not so much

Cycle helmets do not protect against scrambled brains - search for pictures of anti concussion helmets and note how different they are.

According to some, having a bigger heavier head actually makes it more likely that you'll hit your head in a crash when otherwise you would have been able to tuck your head in at typical cycling speeds. It's up to you if you want to take that risk, but I feel it would be better if you informed yourself first.

 

[Drago]

Indeed, rotational brain inury, inertial brain injury, spinal torque injuries...things that tentatively look like they could be caused or aggravated by helmet wearing in certain crash circumstances.

I'm a famous fence sitter on the helmet debate - I usually, but not always, wear one simply because it's one less stuck to be beaten with by a myopic drivers insurers, and my own insurers insist I wear one when teaching. All I would say is that if you decide to do something in the name of safety then look for evidence that it actually contributes to that goal. It's like daytime light usage. "Just in case" safety measures can have unforeseen effects that actually reduce safety. Things that intuitively seem a good idea in the name of safety usually reveal some significant dangers when properly scrutinised. That's why you won't find a single helmet manufacturer that will straight out and say that their product will, or is even likely to, protect you from injury, or reduce injury levels. Not a single one.

 

[icowden]

A useful study in the BMJ suggests that the risk of not wearing a helmet are greater than the risks of wearing a helmet:-

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/9/9/e027845.full.pdf

 

[rogerzilla]

I tried wearing one on the road for the first time in a couple of years last summer. It didn't go well.

1. Sweat poured into my eyes and my glasses became salt-stained to the point where I had to stop and try to clean them using water from the bottle. The pads become saturated and then drip as the helmet moves around on your head slightly and they get squeezed.

2. A wasp flew into one of the front vents and (understandably, given that it was trapped) stung me very painfully. At that point I ripped the helmet off my head and flung it into the hedge to get rid of the wasp. I looked for it the next week but it wasn't there.

How do people cope with extremes of temperature? When it's -10 and I'm riding to work, I want a thick fleecy hat. When it's +30, I just want something that keeps the sun off my hairless head, like a UV Buff. A Buff and a helmet would kill me from heatstroke, I think, and a helmet and no Buff would kill me more slowly from skin cancer (I'm not exaggerating, I have to have solar keratoses removed quite regularly).

 

[icowden]

Personally I find a well vented helmet keeps the sun off my hairless pate enough. I haven't had any problems with pads or sweating but my helmet is pretty much unpadded (I should probably get a MIPS or WaveCel Helmet).

In the winter I wear a thermal skull cap underneath to stop the cold. Sometimes a buff over my ears, nose and mouth too. I think you can get UV skull caps for summer but I haven't tried one.

 

[icowden]

That's why you won't find a single helmet manufacturer that will straight out and say that their product will, or is even likely to, protect you from injury, or reduce injury levels. Not a single one.

Trek seem to come close:-

The XXX WaveCel road bike helmet has been shown in a recent study to be 5x more effective than traditional foam helmets in protecting your head from injuries caused by certain cycling accidents.*

*Based on reduction in rotational acceleration at impact. Probability of injury in an actual accident depends on numerous factors, including the nature of the impact and individual health.

and

Does it prevent concussions?

Open Reply - Customer Service
There is no helmet on the market that can prevent concussions 100% of the time. Every crash is different, but WaveCel has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of concussion and traumatic brain injury. Nearly 99 times out of 100, WaveCel prevents concussions caused by common cycling accidents.* The edge of a WaveCel helmet has an EPS ledge and the ledge area will have impact characteristics similar to EPS. *Results based on AIS 2 Injury (BrIC) at 6.2 m/s test at 45° comparing a standard EPS Helmet and the same helmet modified with WaveCel insert as described in detail in Evaluation of a Novel Bicycle Helmet Concept in Oblique Impact Testing. This study compares standard foam helmets and the same helmets with WaveCel inserts in a simulation of a typical bike crash.

That's a pretty close assertion that Wavecel is likely to reduce injury levels.

 

[theclaud]

Trek seem to come close:-



and



That's a pretty close assertion that Wavecel is likely to reduce injury levels.

Tricky to cut through the marketing waffle before losing the will to live, but what claims there are seem to be about the lid reducing injury levels compared to existing lids. In other words, all lids could make this worse, but ours a bit less so thanks to clever stuff.

 

[classic33]

Your external parts, your skull for instance, come to a sudden stop. Your brain is in a fluid dampened area, the skull. Allowing for slight movement.

The problem being that the brain can take months to stop "bouncing around" in its fluid dampened sphere. Helmet or not, having come to the sudden stop it'll take time to go back to the state it was in before the sudden stop. It can be "fun" whilst waiting for it to stop, so it pays to keep an eye open for any minor changes. Vision being one of the first where you'd notice it.

I got a fresh hole in the head not so long ago, whilst in the house. Approx 3/4" long, with what I'd class as a minor cut(I managed to stop the bleeding), no hospital treatment required this time.

Helmets can prevent the latter, visible problem, but proving that they can or can't stop the invisible problems is still open for debate amongst those who actually know what they are talking about.

 

[mjr]

A useful study in the BMJ suggests that the risk of not wearing a helmet are greater than the risks of wearing a helmet:-

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/9/9/e027845.full.pdf

There are numerous odd things there, including that their study group is majority helmet-using when the population is not, and that there are more drunks in the non-helmet group, which suggests sober helmet users are ending up in hospital disproportionately.

 

[Drago]

Lance, did I ever tell you about the time one of my students borked their helmet? Morning of day 1, unbox your helmets so I can prattle on about proper fit, how to adjust it, born on dates etc... one of the lasses who was none too tall had her newly opened helmet on her lap when it slid off and fell onto the carpeted office floor. It received a significant crack of the polystyrene structure as a result, although the cosmetic outer shell appeared ok.

That was an empty Specialized cycle helmet that weighed about 8.5 ounces - I wouldn't have faith in it to have protected the wearer for anything except the most minor of grazes if it'd had a head inside it as it dropped.

 

[icowden]

There are numerous odd things there, including that their study group is majority helmet-using when the population is not, and that there are more drunks in the non-helmet group, which suggests sober helmet users are ending up in hospital disproportionately.

And can we have a reference source to back up your assertion that 61% of cyclists in the study were wearing helmets yet the overall percentage of helmet wearers in the UK is less than 50%? Otherwise we are back to "i'm right, you're wrong". My experience of cycling in Surrey and London is that 61% helmet wearing is not unlikely.

I think you can draw a number of inferences from the drunk vs sober data including that people are less likely to wear a helmet when drunk, however the proportion isn't really of value unless you can also correlate whether the drunkenness was a factor in the accident. Similarly isn't it rather likely that those that were intoxicated were cycling a short distance when compared to those cycling sober? Thus sober cyclists are likely to have a higher exposure of risk per mile travelled than the intoxicated group. None of this, of course, is in the data.

What the data does suggest is that overall the injury results were better for the group wearing helmets than those who were not.
It would be interesting to see an updated study as my impression is that there has been a huge increase in cycling over the last 5 years. This dataset cut off was Septemeber 2017.

 

[classic33]

Lance, did I ever tell you about the time one of my students borked their helmet? Morning of day 1, unbox your helmets so I can prattle on about proper fit, how to adjust it, born on dates etc... one of the lasses who was none too tall had her newly opened helmet on her lap when it slid off and fell onto the carpeted office floor. It received a significant crack of the polystyrene structure as a result, although the cosmetic outer shell appeared ok.

That was an empty Specialized cycle helmet that weighed about 8.5 ounces - I wouldn't have faith in it to have protected the wearer for anything except the most minor of grazes if it'd had a head inside it as it dropped.

Not until now.

 

[srw]

A useful study in the BMJ suggests that the risk of not wearing a helmet are greater than the risks of wearing a helmet:-

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/9/9/e027845.full.pdf

Well, err, no. That's not what it says. It's very careful about the conclusions it draws.

" This study suggests that there is a
significant correlation between use of cycle helmets and
reduction in adjusted mortality and morbidity associated
with TBI [Traumatic Brain Injury] and facial injury."

When you remember that it was a study into "all adult (≥16 years) patients presenting to hospital with
cycling-related major injuries" there are many ways that conclusion could be interpreted other than the one you suggest.

 

[srw]

It's also worth reading the authors' caveat section carefully. It undermines the conclusion they choose to draw, and equally supports the conclusion that wearing a helmet is correlated with increased injury to parts of the body other than the head.

And it's always worth bearing in mind that this is a study mainly focussed on the 6000 odd riders in a 5 year period who ended up in hospital "with cycling-related major injuries" and for whom the admitting doctors recorded whether they happened to be helmeted. It doesn't talk about the 5000 odd admitted without that being recorded. Or about the several million riders who weren't admitted to hospital in that period.

 

[rogerzilla]

The only truly comfortable helmet I've owned was a Giro Air Blast circa 1994 in my favourite colours, purple and orange. The "hardshell" covering melted and shrank when I left it in a hot car 😭