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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

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 https://youtu.be/EU4AhFFSlLg?si=iaHawCdigvVuKkPe

Filligree 3y ago
They still reduce the severity, right? And a single instance of concussion shouldn't significantly harm you. Usually. For sports, though... yeah.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  It's still a traumatic brain injury and the clinical boundary is fuzzy. A concussion that significantly harms you is just called a TBI so I guess it's denotationally correct that one concussion is fine. Not very reassuring though.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hinkley 3y ago
There are two standards for bicycle helmet and the more stringent one was intended to prevent concussion from a fall from normal riding height. How that works when you hit a car at 15 mph I cannot say. 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.
- chrisfosterelli 3y ago
  I was going to say "all helmets are one and done" -- I'm a cyclist and I'm so used to the community saying that you must replace a helmet after any impact at all -- but then I remembered in football you just smash helmets together all day and then do it again tomorrow, which seems problematic when you think about it.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Same with baseball helmets and wild pitches.
- whartung 3y ago
  > How that works when you hit a car at 15 mph I cannot say. 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.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Bike helmets used to have a thick shell like motorcycle helmets but they were a pain in the neck. For adoption and airflow we have gone to thin shells meant more to prevent dings and reduce some of the friction you mention. These helmets weigh less than half of what a Bell helmet used to weigh.
chollida1 3y ago
> I recently found out that helmets do nothing to prevent concussion regardless of the sport. 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-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.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  >> 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.
  - chollida1 3y ago
    So is that a good thing? your comment is very unclear and ambiguous:)
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      Pointless; you're improving from a level that is unimaginably terrible to a level that is also unimaginably terrible. 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. 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.
JoshGG 3y ago
False. Helmets are shown to reduce concussion and other head injuries in sport. For example: https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/headgear-significantly-reduces-girls-lacrosse-concussions-landmark-uf-health-study-finds 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
- aidenn0 3y ago
  3 players on my daughter's lacrosse team are out with concussions. I really hope helmets get mandated; for various reasons nobody wants to be the only player in a helmet. [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.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > 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.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      But a 37% reduction in concussion rate (as implied by the Florida data) could make increased frequency of other injury worth it; if the effect on concussions were negligible, then wearing helmets would be a net-negative.
slg 3y ago
>I recently found out that helmets do nothing to prevent concussion regardless of the sport. 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.
rurp 3y ago
Similarly, it's a common misconception that boxing/mma gloves are there to make the sport safer when it's actually the opposite. They allow the wearer to throw many more and harder striks without injuring their hands, while not actually protecting the opponent at all.
aidenn0 3y ago
I think you'll find there's a wide space between "do nothing to prevent" and "prevents all" and, depending on the sport and helmet design, helmets live mostly in that space. 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.
martinky24 3y ago
This is wildly misinformed, and I'm curious of your "source". I presume it's nowhere near as reputable as stuff coming out of places such as the VA Tech Helmet Lab.
ben7799 3y ago
This depends on the level of hit that the sport causes, how often it happens, and the type of helmet and the design goals of that helmet. 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.
callamdelaney 3y ago
You are absolutely right, at least as it relates to combat sports. 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.

Filligree 3y ago

They still reduce the severity, right? And a single instance of concussion shouldn't significantly harm you. Usually. For sports, though... yeah.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
It's still a traumatic brain injury and the clinical boundary is fuzzy. A concussion that significantly harms you is just called a TBI so I guess it's denotationally correct that one concussion is fine. Not very reassuring though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hinkley 3y ago

There are two standards for bicycle helmet and the more stringent one was intended to prevent concussion from a fall from normal riding height. How that works when you hit a car at 15 mph I cannot say. 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.

chrisfosterelli 3y ago
I was going to say "all helmets are one and done" -- I'm a cyclist and I'm so used to the community saying that you must replace a helmet after any impact at all -- but then I remembered in football you just smash helmets together all day and then do it again tomorrow, which seems problematic when you think about it.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Same with baseball helmets and wild pitches.
whartung 3y ago
> How that works when you hit a car at 15 mph I cannot say. 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.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Bike helmets used to have a thick shell like motorcycle helmets but they were a pain in the neck. For adoption and airflow we have gone to thin shells meant more to prevent dings and reduce some of the friction you mention. These helmets weigh less than half of what a Bell helmet used to weigh.

chollida1 3y ago

> I recently found out that helmets do nothing to prevent concussion regardless of the sport. 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-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.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
>> 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.
- chollida1 3y ago
  So is that a good thing? your comment is very unclear and ambiguous:)
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Pointless; you're improving from a level that is unimaginably terrible to a level that is also unimaginably terrible. 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. 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.

JoshGG 3y ago

False. Helmets are shown to reduce concussion and other head injuries in sport. For example: https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/headgear-significantly-reduces-girls-lacrosse-concussions-landmark-uf-health-study-finds 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

aidenn0 3y ago
3 players on my daughter's lacrosse team are out with concussions. I really hope helmets get mandated; for various reasons nobody wants to be the only player in a helmet. [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.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > 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.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    But a 37% reduction in concussion rate (as implied by the Florida data) could make increased frequency of other injury worth it; if the effect on concussions were negligible, then wearing helmets would be a net-negative.

slg 3y ago

>I recently found out that helmets do nothing to prevent concussion regardless of the sport. 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.

rurp 3y ago

Similarly, it's a common misconception that boxing/mma gloves are there to make the sport safer when it's actually the opposite. They allow the wearer to throw many more and harder striks without injuring their hands, while not actually protecting the opponent at all.

aidenn0 3y ago

I think you'll find there's a wide space between "do nothing to prevent" and "prevents all" and, depending on the sport and helmet design, helmets live mostly in that space. 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.

martinky24 3y ago

This is wildly misinformed, and I'm curious of your "source". I presume it's nowhere near as reputable as stuff coming out of places such as the VA Tech Helmet Lab.

ben7799 3y ago

This depends on the level of hit that the sport causes, how often it happens, and the type of helmet and the design goals of that helmet. 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.

callamdelaney 3y ago

You are absolutely right, at least as it relates to combat sports. 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.