Experts attribute bike-related trauma injuries among Nova Scotia youth to helmet-related indifference

When statistics indicate that many Canadian youths don’t wear helmets on their bikes, certain other numbers, unfortunately, become less surprising.

As reported by the CBC, a study in the Canadian Medical Education Journal attributed 53% of all sports-related trauma injuries suffered by Nova Scotia kids to cycling. The study focused on 107 cases spanning a 13-year period, among a cross-section of youths 18 years of age or younger who suffered a serious injury while engaged in recreational activities.

The study’s author, the CBC said, was surprised that the usual suspects weren’t to blame.

“We found, remarkably, that hockey is number two, not number one. And it’s a distant number two,” said Dr. Robert Green, medical director of Trauma Nova Scotia. Head injuries, along with chest trauma and the breaking of major bones, were prominent among the study’s criteria, and it underscored a critical piece of the report’s data: only 36 percent of kids hurt on their bikes, it said, were wearing a helmet.

Nova Scotia is one of the provincial jurisdictions in Canada in which helmets are mandatory for anyone who rides a bike or a skateboard, along with British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. Still, the Canadian Community Health Survey, published earlier this summer, indicated that only 50.9% of youths in Nova Scotia reported donning protective headwear — a fact framed by yet broader statistics, published by the same study, that said only 42% of Canadian cyclists over the age of 12 reported the regular use of helmets.

Green’s report has been under review for some time, before being published by the Canadian Medical Education Journal last month. Early in the review process, back in March, Global News also reported on the study’s findings. At that time, Green suggested that the solution to such a high frequency of traumatic injury among bike-riding kids involves taking cycling itself more seriously.

Doing so, he suggested, means treating helmets more seriously, too.

“A lot of those [cycling incidents], I would presume would be related to motor vehicle collisions,” he said. “If we look at the use of helmets, 100 percent of our hockey population used a helmet. In the cycling population, it was 36 percent so we have a lot of work to do to increase the use of helmets.”