Do All Road Helmets Protect Equally?

[chromopromo]

I fell hard riding my cyclocross bike six month ago and suffered a concussion which is still keeping me off the bike. I am just starting to ride again - very slowly - and need a new helmet.

I have read that bike helmets are design to meet the same safety standards and that you should just find one that fits well. There seems almost no discussion on how well various helmets actually protect you in a fall. Is there any actual crash test information on the various bike helmets. Are there any companies that claim their helmets offer greater crash protection? This is not something I was ever concerned about but I have a new found interest in protecting my eggshell head.

[vqdriver]

Yes that's the working theory anyway. Look at the stickers inside to see the standards met. Used to be ANSI and snell, but I think it's changed now. Ones American and the others euro. Get one certified for both to play it safe.


Wrong forum btw

[LO^OK]

I fell hard riding my cyclocross bike six month ago and suffered a concussion which is still keeping me off the bike. I am just starting to ride again - very slowly - and need a new helmet.

I have read that bike helmets are design to meet the same safety standards and that you should just find one that fits well. There seems almost no discussion on how well various helmets actually protect you in a fall. Is there any actual crash test information on the various bike helmets. Are there any companies that claim their helmets offer greater crash protection? This is not something I was ever concerned about but I have a new found interest in protecting my eggshell head.

www.pocsports.com

[Fixed]

I am glad you getting back to riding ,you may have a new prospective on things after a concussion ...the best helmet is one you like that fits and you wear .
Cheers :)

[shovelhd]

Yes that's the working theory anyway. Look at the stickers inside to see the standards met. Used to be ANSI and snell, but I think it's changed now. Ones American and the others euro. Get one certified for both to play it safe.


Wrong forum btw

In the USA it's the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission).

[Rueda Tropical]

http://www.helmets.org/guide.htm

safety standards:
http://www.helmets.org/standard.htm

[Grant McLean]

There seems almost no discussion on how well various helmets actually protect you in a fall.

That's because there is very little actual research on the subject.

If you look up some of the claims, you'll be shocked at the lack of evidence.
A commonly sighted statistic is that helmets reduce head injuries by up to 85%.
It doesn't take much critical thinking to wonder how they are defining what
an injury is ( a scratch? ) But then promoting "our helmets reduce cuts by
85% doesn't have the same ring to it.

One often cited study is this one:
DO BICYCLE SAFETY HELMETS REDUCE SEVERITY OF HEAD INJURY IN REAL CRASHES?
MARGARET M. DORSCH§, ALISTAIR J. WOODWARD? and
RONALD L. SOMERS’

The scientific method behind that one? A mail-in survey of cyclists.
Yeah, that's proof.

Both Hockey and Football are going through a serious review of the effectiveness
of helmets to prevent concussions. It's really the same story, most users have
assumed for years that the helmets sold have actually been tested for the claims,
but as is the case with Riddell now, they actually do not have the evidence to
support the claims, and therefore most helmet companies are very reluctant
to make any statements about the effectiveness of their helmets.

The POC website it typical. It talks about how their products are tested by
worldclass athletes. Tested? They mean paid to use...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2012/06/21/why-football-helmet-manufacturer-riddell-should-be-very-concerned-about-concussion-litigation/

-g

[djg]

Here are two different questions:

(1) Is there any good systematic evidence that one model/brand bike helmet is safer or more protective than another?

(2) Are all bike helmets equally safe or protective?

I suspect that the answer to the first question is no, and that the answer to the second question is we really don't know. I haven't done anything remotely like a comprehensive search (for a quick and dirty one, you could try google scholar), but my impression is that research on the topic is much more limited than you might like. There's testing by various standards associations -- some of it is real testing, but maybe all of it collectively is a far cry from a deep investigation of the behavior of helmets and heads amidst the complex dynamics of messy, varied, real world crashes -- and then this and that for ad hoc investigations. Here's something from CPSC listing various standards organizations and what they do: http://www.helmets.org/standard.htm (and here's their own thing: http://www.helmets.org/testing.htm).

Obviously there are common sense things you can take into account and juggle however you do -- how well does a given helmet fit, how much coverage is there, is the surface roughly smooth or does it appear likely to catch on something -- but in the end, you only know what you know, and maybe the most important thing is riding safe and being aware. And understanding both that bicycling is pretty safe compared to a lot of things one might do and that it's not, in any case, risk free.

[eddief]

My last crash was more than 5 years ago when I had a car left turn in front of me. My head was not involved. Since then, I have ridden thousands of crashless miles. A month ago, I was riding in a small casual club group with 8 riders. Tooling along at 20 mph, I was just outside the painted single stripe lane on smooth 4 lane boulevard. Saw cars coming from behind in rear view mirror, and then tried to merge back into the group all of whom were in the proper bike/parking lane. Misjudged my merge, touched wheel of cyclist in front of me. Out of control, went down, and hit on right forehead, right ear, right elbow, right butt cheek. As it relates to helmets, mine was cracked all the way through the foam right at the point of forehead impact. My forehead was bleeding from being dented by helmet rather than direct ground impact. 5 hours in the ER (they were really slow), but no concussion and nothing broken. Easy to forget about the helmet with so many miles without incident.

I purchased a new, identical Bell Influx...and nearly a month since the accident, my fault, I am nearly all healed. I believe.

[carpediemracing]

I've read a few of the helmet tests done by various bike magazines. There are two factors you should consider:

1. Lowest impact force where helmet begins to work.
2. Highest impact force where helmet works.

My understanding is that the helmet standards only test for highest impact (i.e. helmet impact, pointy object, helmet strap). This is sort of like testing cars in the offset 35 mph head on collision - it's a dramatic test, it reveals flaws invisible at lower impacts, etc.

As an example of a "highest impact" kind of situation I saw or read some piece on a driver involved in a head on collision (another car crossed a median and hit the driver in question). The car protected the driver but a piece of the interior almost destroyed the driver's knee. Apparently this happened regularly with this type of car when it crashed in that manner. Using crash test feedback the manufacturer changed the interior a bit to prevent this injury going forward. This is why, if you get into some older cars, there's a lot of stuff going on around your knees/shins which are missing in new cars.

A more common type of incident is the parking lot fender bender. For many years a bumper had to sustain 5 mph impact without much damage to the car. When that threshold was lowered to 2.5 mph the cost of a 5 mph impact increased dramatically. I think the bumper standards are now 5 mph, which really means that at 6 mph you're starting to damage trunk lids, hoods, fenders and quarter panels. This is an example of a "minimum impact" situation.

So, for a bike helmet, you have the "massive head on collision" scenario or the "5 mph" scenario. The normal testing standards measure the former. I don't know of any standard that measures the latter.

That low impact scenario is realistic to me now that I have a baby boy (who is not quite 9 months old). He has a soft skull, it won't be fully fused/formed for at least another year and change (and in fact you can see his pulse at the top of his head, where there's a normal hole kind of thing in his skull).

If I put my son in a high end CPSC passing helmet (like a high level Giro or Bell) and he falls over in it, he's going to cry. The foam in those helmets is very dense so it'll be just one step softer than falling on a wood floor (and the ventilation ridges inside will actually concentrate force on his skull). To him there is no protection from a 15" fall because the foam doesn't start to compress in that situation - only his soft skull will move, along with his brain and whatever else.

If I put my son next to a pillow and he falls and hits his head on that, he won't notice the fall. The pillow won't pass CSPC standards - a 300G hit (or whatever) will render the pillow basically transparent - but for a low speed impact it works, from 15 inches high. This is a real life example of the 5 mph bumper rule - virtually useless at higher impacts but very real at the low impact forces in such a situation.

So... what determines how safe a helmet is? It depends on the situation. For most serious falls you're dealing with a solid impact from at least 4-5 feet of height. Once an adult is doing more than 2-3 mph on a bike the helmet may deform, i.e. the impact exceeds the minimum threshold. If you're racing or doing group rides or even doing regular rides around cars/etc then a CSPC helmet will be very good. It will work hard to protect you in those high impact situations.

If you fall at very low speeds, low impact, such a helmet won't deform, so it won't help, and, as mentioned earlier, the ventilation ridges may even focus impact forces along ridges of skull. It might be better to get a very inexpensive helmet that uses a very soft foam (and lots of it - making the helmet awfully thick), with no ventilation ridges. Such foam should deform much more easily than the very hard, very strong, very dense foam in a high end Giro etc.

It might be in the future that we'll see two layers of foam - a softer one inside for low level impacts, the harder stuff outside for high level impacts.

For now, for general use, the hard stuff aces the tests better.

If I were selecting a helmet for my kid I'd push a thumbnail into the foam, somewhere unobtrusive. The easier it dents the softer the foam. I'm assuming everyone will be selling CSPC helmets so I'd get the softest helmet I can find (with a CSPC sticker).

I figure that for me I'll be falling over harder. Therefore I buy whatever CSPC helmet, with whatever hardness/density foam. I'm concerned with the "head on collision" type falls for myself.

[chromopromo]

My Rudy Project helmet showed no signs of damage or compression after my accident. And I wonder if a softer liner would have helped. I landed on dirt on the side of my head. I have done considerable reading on concussions and some research suggested that bike helmets could cause additional damage by increasing rotational force in certain situations. This seems possible in my case. On the other hand, I got side-swiped by an 90 year driver a few years ago and my helmet ended up cracking right done the middle. I had no real concussion symptoms. I have no doubt that the helmet greatly reduced my injuries in that case. I will continue to always wear a helmet but I it would be nice if there was more information out there. Ride safe -- its my new mantra.

[ultraman6970]

IMO there is no way to predict how the helmet will perform in real life situations, the guys made all testing posible but you might never know because in real situations the helmets and the rider will do probably the most unreal things.

Seen guys hit pavement with the old plastic brancales and foam ones right in the middle of their skulls and nothing hapened to them not the helmets, saw a kid racing with me using a newer version in plastic and foam of brancale helmet and he hit his head from the side and he went comma for a week.

A guy swears that he hit me with his pedal in the track the 1st year I race when i was like 12 and the darn leather helmet did not have even a scratch. Saw the guy 3 years ago in a visit and he still insist that he hit me with a pedal.

IMO if you arent lucky you can have the best helmet in the market to fail, for example in the giro that guy who crashed going down, he hit the pavement or a wall with the whole face, no helmet was going to help, the same than with soler 1 year ago he hit a wall, he is retired now because of the brain injuries.

[Ahneida Ride]

More helmet = More protection ...

Take a look at the discontinued Bell Metro Helmet ..

http://www.bicyclebuys.com/helmets/HelmetSport/BEME4PART

[11.4]

Big ugly topic.

A couple national track teams did some fairly extensive testing, especially after Galvez died at the Gent 6-day a couple years ago. The European and Australian track venues, at least, are in the process of deciding on and mandating tougher helmet standards.

A few basic points:

1. Snell is in almost all regards much more demanding than CPSC. At least, echoing the points above about crash scenarios, it seeks to protect in a broader range of scenarios.

2. A helmet is basically compressible material (which absorbs the blow) and a matrix or frame (which holds the foam together long enough to do its thing). Some helmets rely heavily on the outside plastic shell to hold the foam together, which is good and bad -- it keeps pieces from breaking out better than an internal kevlar or carbon or plastic frame does, but it also does fail in its own right. Different helmets are designed these days with finite element analysis that drives specs such as large vents, aerodynamics, profile, etc. but doesn't do more for safety than meet CPSC specs.

3. CPSC testing depends on rather artificially simulated blows to specific points on the head. Look at any CPSC helmet and see where the foam is thickest and you just found the testing points. Look at the points where a CPSC helmet is thin, and you found the risk points that aren't tested. It's that simple. You build a helmet to pass CPSC standards if you want to sell it. Take the Giro Pneumo, for example. It had a central-front join so flimsy that the helmets used to break and come apart there just in regular casual use, but the parietal areas (above and behind the ears) are hugely protected, as is the back of the head. Not a good helmet for frontal impacts (or for top of the head impacts, for that matter). Specialized's top helmets for several years were much thicker and bulkier in those areas as well, to earn Snell approval, but they became heavier, and they didn't have the svelte look that people wanted to see in helmets. Since the Pneumo was Lance's helmet for a couple years, everyone wanted it and everyone followed suit. Giro improved on it with the next model (the Atmos, if I remember correctly) which was nowhere as svelte but much safer, more durable, and also made with bigger vents to obscure the fact that it also had a lot more foam all around it.

4. Neither CPSC nor Snell (and I see hardly any helmets still trying to meet the Snell standard) address how the helmet protects your neck. Aero helmets are notorious on the track in crashes for causing serious neck trauma because they cause your head to be twisted uncontrollably. They also exacerbate concussions caused by rotating your head in various directions and causing a subdural bruise as the brain hits the rotating skull. This is one of several reasons why round helmets like Casco Warps are more popular there -- if you fall, the helmet protects equally and it may bounce off the pavement but it doesn't twist your neck around or give a concussion as readily. You down see downhill skiers using helmets like triathletes like to use -- and even track cyclists have moved away in good part from traditional aero helmets. There's a reason why. And why did Giro create the Air Attack?

5. Most helmets confer a 50+% greater resistance to brain injury if they are adjusted right and the strap is tightened properly. Problem is, when one
manufacturer showed up at Elite Road Nats one year and checked each rider, fewer than 15% had it done right.

6. Gymnasts take some pretty ugly falls in training, and they don't use helmets at all. They do learn to tumble well, and that's part of what a good cyclist's overall training should include. Get a rock climbing crash pad and learn to throw yourself into a tumble and roll with it. Also, learn how to crash on a bike -- stay in the pedals, keep your shoulders in, your hands on the bars, and tuck your head in, and you'll do ok. Stretch a hand out and stick your head way up, and you break things. I could argue that falling technique (tumbling and how to crash on a bike) does more to protect you than a helmet does except for the unusual situations such as being hit hard by a car and thrown.

7. Specific helmets that are better than others? On the road I used to rely on the Specialized Decibel and then the Prevail (both with CPSC, Snell, and often now the AS/NZ approval which is pretty comprehensive as well). I appreciate that stores don't want to incur liability by making assertions about one helmet over another, so the "what fits you best" is a good way to sidestep the issue. And to a degree, it's certainly true. But although I like many helmets, if you compare Specialized with Giro, you'll see a heavier helmet but much more bulk and more of an endoskeleton on the former. I'm not endorsing Specialized. Just saying that Giro is very weight- and ventilation-driven, while Specialized has had a tradition of focusing on more bulkier but arguably more protective designs. Same for some of the European designs. And while I'd never recommend it on the road because it does get too hot, the Casco Warp is a superb helmet for the track, and I'll be standing in line to try out an Air Attack on the road next year. Just look at the helmet critically and meanwhile, learn how to tumble and fall.

[William]

6. Gymnasts take some pretty ugly falls in training, and they don't use helmets at all. They do learn to tumble well, and that's part of what a good cyclist's overall training should include. Get a rock climbing crash pad and learn to throw yourself into a tumble and roll with it. Also, learn how to crash on a bike -- stay in the pedals, keep your shoulders in, your hands on the bars, and tuck your head in, and you'll do ok. Stretch a hand out and stick your head way up, and you break things. I could argue that falling technique (tumbling and how to crash on a bike) does more to protect you than a helmet does except for the unusual situations such as being hit hard by a car and thrown.



A big +1000 on that!

My parents had me taking tumbling classes when I was very young. I can't tell you how many times knowing how to fall has saved me from more serious injuries in literally hundreds of falls I have taken in the various sports (cycling included) and rough housing I've done throughout my life. I think all kids should learn how to tumble. :cool:







William

[bironi]

Thanks to the OP and the contributors. I purchase by comfort and price, but may be more discerning in my next purchase. I have been trying to get a buddy to adjust his straps for a few years, but he is stubborn and I have not been able to influence his behavior.

[old iron rider]

Might sound strange, but after racing motorcycles years ago, I just kind of favor Bell helmets. My reasoning being, they have been in the biz a long time, and making helmets for guys going many times faster than I'll ever go on a bicycle. Real world facts might say I'm totally wrong using this train of thought. But for a guy who refused to wear a bicycle helmet for years, its the way I'm thinking now.

[ultraman6970]

This is an awesome advice, the many accidents I have seen are because of panic from the riders. Like lock wheels in grable, and just being shoot out of the bike and landing in their shoulders or head w/o any logic explanation to me. A tracker rider told me exactly what william is saying like 30 years ago in a matter of fact as much control you have from the fall the better, slide is better than nothing when you have lost control of the bike, just let it go and try to slide it w/o touching the brakes, legs will get burn but no problems in the bike or anywhere else.

Never lose coolness in accidents because thats when the worse happens.

A big +1000 on that!

My parents had me taking tumbling classes when I was very young. I can't tell you how many times knowing how to fall has saved me from more serious injuries in literally hundreds of falls I have taken in the various sports (cycling included) and rough housing I've done throughout my life. I think all kids should learn how to tumble. :cool:







William

[Fixed]

I knew all about roll outs too and they protected me many times ,but it only takes one time for a car to hit you squarely to ruin your day
Cheers