The promotion of bicycle helmet use in children and youth: an overview of reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Bicycle‐related head injuries are a common reason for paediatric emergency department visits. Helmets have been designed to reduce head injuries, and helmet use has been encouraged through mandatory helmet legislation and nonlegislation helmet promotion activities. Objectives To synthesize the evidence published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews regarding bicycle helmet use among children, including helmet effectiveness and methods to promote helmet use. Methods The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews was searched for all systematic reviews where ‘bicycle*’ or ‘helmet’ appeared in title, abstract or keywords. Reviews were included if they examined paediatric data concerning head injuries among helmeted and nonhelmeted cyclists, helmet use or adverse consequences of helmets. Data pertaining to adults were excluded. Relevant data were extracted, entered into tables and synthesized using qualitative and quantitative methods. Main results Three systematic reviews were identified and included 21 observational studies and 14 experimental studies. The methodological quality was assessed in only two of the reviews: the quality was similar in studies examining legislative interventions and several weaknesses were identified in the nonlegislative interventions. Among children, helmet use resulted in a 63% reduction in medically reported head injuries [adjusted odds ratio (OR): 0.37; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.20, 0.66] and an 86% reduction in the odds of brain injuries (OR: 0.14; 95% CI: 0.05, 0.38). Enactment of mandatory helmet legislation for child cyclists reduced the odds of head injury hospitalizations by 45%, while the odds of head injury hospitalizations reduced by 27% among children in jurisdictions without legislation. There was a significant reduction in traumatic brain injury among children cycling after the passage of helmet legislation (OR: 0.82; 95% CI: 0.76, 0.89); however, there was no significant decrease in other head and facial injuries post‐legislation (OR: 1.08; 95% CI: 0.90, 1.23). Legislation also resulted in a significant increase in the number of children observed wearing a helmet (prevalence ratio: 3.69; 95% CI: 2.65, 5.14). Compared with children who received no intervention, those who received nonlegislative helmet promotion activities had a significant increase in observed helmet wearing (OR: 2.08; 95% CI: 1.29, 3.34), self‐reported helmet wearing (OR: 3.27; 95% CI: 1.56, 6.87) and self‐reported helmet ownership (OR: 2.67; 95% CI: 0.89, 8.03). No adverse events were associated with helmet use among cyclists. Authors' conclusions Bicycle helmets appear to be an effective way to reduce head injuries among children. Interventions to increase helmet use may be effective, particularly community‐based, school‐based, and those that provide free helmets; however, no effect of the interventions on helmet use were reported in randomized controlled trials. Finally, helmet legislation appears to be effective in increasing helmet use and reducing head injuries. Copyright © 2011 The Cochrane Collaboration. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The Cochrane Collaboration
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".