OBJECTIVE While community interventions to increase bicycle helmet use have increased markedly, few of these studies are theoretically based. The purpose of this study was to determine relationships among PRECEDE model predictors and self reported helmet use among 407 fourth graders from nine low income, non-urban schools. SETTING Low income schools, with high minority populations in eight no...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the influence of average family income in a geographic area on the effectiveness of helmet legislation on observed helmet use by children (5-14 years). METHODS The study was conducted in East York, a health district of Metropolitan Toronto, in collaboration with the East York Health Unit. In 1996, the total population was 107 822, 11 340 of which were children 5 to 14 ye...

A model is developed which permits the quantitative evaluation of the health benefit of bicycle helmet laws. The efficacy of the law is evaluated in terms of the percentage drop in bicycling, the percentage increase in the cost of an accident when not wearing a helmet, and a quantity here called the “bicycling beta.” The approach balances the health benefits of increased safety against the heal...

Legislation that mandate people to wear bicycle safety helmets while using a bicycle has been used as a method of head injury prevention by a number of jurisdictions i n Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States for over a decade. Many helmet laws have been evaluated and most of these studies used helmet-wearing rates among bicyclists as a measure of the legislative effects. Few stu...

OBJECTIVE To identify bicycle-related injuries in children and the effect of helmet use on injury patterns and prevention. DESIGN A prospective cohort of injured children with case-control design looking at serious head injuries and helmet use. SETTING A tertiary care childrens' hospital emergency room. PATIENTS All patients presenting between April 1, 1991 and September 30, 1993, between...

INTRODUCTION The objective of this study was to survey Canadian parents on their attitudes and beliefs about bicycle helmet legislation and to compare responses from parents living in provinces with and without legislation. METHODS A national survey of 1002 parents of children aged under 18 years was conducted. Chi-square tests were used to compare responses from the surveyed parents in the d...

Background Many readers of Injury Prevention are quite familiar with the debate over bicycle helmet use. The core of this debate is the opinion on one side that helmets are eVective and thus should be worn, countered on the other side by the belief that risk compensation negates this protective eVect of helmets. A systematic review on helmet eVectiveness has been published in the Cochrane Libra...