431 Protective equipment in youth ice hockey: are mouthguards and helmet age relevant in evaluating concussion risk?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The high concussion burden in youth ice hockey is concerning. An important yet understudied area for prevention is protective equipment (e.g., wearing a mouthguard, age of helmet). Objective To compare rates of concussion between players based on mouthguard use and helmet age. Design Prospective cohort. Setting Calgary, Canada over five ice hockey seasons (2013/14–2017/18). Participants Male and female youth ice hockey players ages 11–18. Assessment of Risk Factors Participant baseline reports of mouthguard use (yes/always and sometimes use, no/never use), helmet age (newer/<2 years old, older/≥2 years old), and other important covariables [i.e., weight (kilograms), age group (under-13, under-15, under-18), position (forward, defense, goalie), concussion history (yes, no), body checking policy (allowed, disallowed)] were collected near the start of each season. Moreover, each player’s participation hours were collected throughout each season. Main Outcome Measurements Number of medically diagnosed or therapist identified suspected concussions using validated surveillance methodology in games and practices over 5 seasons of play. Results Multilevel negative binomial regression adjusted for player position, level of play, body checking policy, concussion history, weight, cluster by team, and offset by player-hours was used. The model included 426 concussions suffered by 369 players (from 394 player-seasons; 29 players had recurrent concussions in a single season) over 4,541 player-seasons (271,148.7 player hours). The model demonstrated that players who reported wearing a mouthguard had a 28% lower rate of concussion compared to those who did not (IRR=0.72, 95%CI: 0.55–0.93). Moreover, there were no differences in the concussion rate between newer and older helmet ages (IRR=0.94, 95%CI: 0.76–1.16). Conclusions Protective equipment is an important consideration for concussion prevention and player safety. Wearing a mouthguard was associated with a lower concussion rate and policy mandating mouthguard use should be considered in youth ice hockey. More specific helmet age categories may require further investigation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".