I recently found out that helmets do nothing to prevent concussion regardless of the sport.
On another topic here is a really great video on concussion in MMA https://youtu.be/EU4AhFFSlLg?si=iaHawCdigvVuKkPe
On another topic here is a really great video on concussion in MMA https://youtu.be/EU4AhFFSlLg?si=iaHawCdigvVuKkPe
For example:
https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/headgear-significantly-reduce...
Female high school lacrosse players are significantly less likely to sustain concussions and other injuries if they wear headgear, a landmark study led by University of Florida Health researchers has found.
Girls who play the sport in states that don’t require headgear had a 59% higher concussion rate than players in Florida, the only state with a headgear mandate. The researchers also found lacrosse games were more hazardous than practices: Concussions were 74% higher during competition among players in states without headgear requirements when compared with Florida players.
Those details emerged from data collected during 357,225 games and practices in Florida and other states during three seasons from 2018 to 2021. The findings were presented today at the American Academy of Pediatrics national conference
[edit]
I'm also glad there's data; one reason the players are resistant to the idea of a helmet is that they fear that reduced visibility would lead to increased injury.
They are definitely right about that. The point of the helmet is to make injuries less serious, not less frequent.
Saying they "do nothing" isn't completely true, at least based off more recent designs, but it is generally true that helmets are less effective than most people think. The problem is that your brain can move around in your skull so there is only so much you can do by adding protection outside of your skull. Think of it like putting an egg in a glass jar. Adding padding to the outside of the jar might be enough to save the egg in a single drop, but it isn't going to stop the egg from breaking if you shake the jar.
There is also the fact that safety equipment impacts behavior. Someone wearing a helmet is going to be more cavalier with their head than someone not wearing a helmet. It is possible this effect completely cancels out the slim benefits of a helmet which has caused some people to argue that a game like American football would actually become safer if helmets were outlawed. The main obstacle there is that we absolutely would see a rise in acute injuries like fractured skulls and those are tougher to ignore than the chronic brain damage that might take decades to reveal itself.
This is false. Or you misspoke in some way.
New helmet designs do indeed help prevent concussions by deforming to take the blow and lessen the brain movement in the head, hence reducing concussions.
https://theathletic.com/4776016/2023/08/28/vicis-helmets-nfl...
> According to the NFL and NFLPA, the safer helmet designs that have resulted from the innovations of VICIS and other companies have eliminated between 20 and 25 NFL concussions per year over the last five to seven seasons.
This kind of reminds me of the genre of preschool study where the headline result is cutting the average number of incarcerations per student later in life from 6 to 4.
I see that in 2011 there were 32 NFL teams and a team can field no more than 11 players at a time. If I assume an average of 352 concussions a year, one per year per "stylized active player" - and I would bet the number is higher - a reduction of 25 per year is basically meaningless. That would correspond to a reduction in concussions per player-year from 1 to about 0.93, or if the rate of concussions was three times as high as I assumed above, from 3 to 2.9.
As far as the preschool studies go, people like to use them to argue that the same intervention should have some kind of beneficial effect when applied to normal students whose average lifetime incarcerations are zero. There is no justification for this.
Really, I'd say those 25 people are very happy to not have concussions. You're begin extremely crass just dismissing the health of 25 people.
Which I guess can happen if you look at things strictly through a stats lens and not a personal impact one
Sometimes it's more important to recognize whether anything meaningful has been accomplished than whether people have their hearts in the right place.
If you'll notice, I did explicitly treat player health, as opposed to concussion count:
>> The difference in effects downstream of the incident being counted ("can the player remember where he lives?") is likely to be much smaller than the difference in incidents, because for most purposes there is no difference between the pre- and post-treatment results.
But those are one and done helmets. The helmet destroys itself to save your noggin.
There was talk of putting blue gel inserts into football helmets to provide some of that same protection but in a reusable form. I don’t recall if those became standard though.
Bicycle and motorcycle helmets are primarily designed for the vertical drop, not the horizontal. If we recall our basic physics, impacts have a vertical and horizontal component. The vertical drop from 6+ feet under gravity is the big problem. Most of the time, the horizontal force is the drag of someone slowing down and sliding. There's also the repeated impacts of tumbling to consider.
A horizontal impact mitigation really isn't in the cards. A vertical impact from 6 feet is roughly 15mph. From 15 to 25MPH is almost 3 times the energy, so you can see how it can quickly get untenable to try to mitigate the horizontal impact energy of a rider striking an object.
During a crash, most folks don't strike things horizontally, but they're pretty much guaranteed to hit the ground. Therefore, the helmets are designed to solve the more common problem and most common source of head trauma.
Even though bicycle and motorcycle helmets ostensibly solve the same problem, i.e. melon -> concrete, motorcycle helmets are more robust to deal with the higher speed tumbling and abrasion issues that bicyclists don't really encounter. Plus there's a lot more potential creature comforts in a motorcycle helmet designed for 50MPH travel.
Gridiron football has large, quick people starting facing each other, often getting hit from the blind-side, and no helmet is going to prevent all (or even most) concussions in those situations, which is part of why the NFL has (very belatedly) attempted to address things with rules changes.
Sports that involve being intentionally hit in the head repeatedly (like MMA or boxing) are going to be much worse. You still see people wearing helmets in friendly sparring matches for those sports because it can prevent freak-accident concussions that happen in such a context.
Getting punched in the head is pretty unpleasant, so you try to avoid it - but with headgear on the sting dulled significantly - it hurts less but your brain is still absorbing a huge amount of that energy. This makes fighters take more shots to the head than otherwise, and this is why english amateur boxing rules now have removed headguards.
A motorcycle helmet or auto racing helmet will do a much better job at preventing a concussion than a football helmet and is designed for bigger hits against harder surfaces.
But no one wants to replace a motorsports style helmet after every play that causes a hit on the helmet in a football game. Hence they wear football helmets, which are designed to be much less protective for a single large hit but to be able to protect against sustained smaller hits.
Realistically I think this is the elephant in the room for football. The NFL could afford to have each player go through hundreds of helmets a season and they would be well protected. But as soon as the NFL admitted that was needed everyone would demand it for college and high school, and it would be too expensive and fewer people would play football.
For sports, though... yeah.