Re - (Old school) NFL helmets

Whilst the helmet protects the outer skull itself, most concussive impacts are (I understand) caused by the brain hitting the inside of the skull as a result of shock/impact.

Obviously with these sorts of studies, the games have evolved since the times that the subjects have played/study periods passed, and medical/welfare advances have already been made to address player head injuries.

So its not just the head shots then, its the impact from every tackle i suppose.

Whilst I think they dropped the ball for a few weeks last month, on this I think it's no different to other sports. Look at the coverage doping in athletics and cycling gets, the former is taking much of the coverage leading to the Winter Olympics. The issues surrounding the new (Phil Neville) and former (Mark Sampson) women's England football managers took more prominence than the matches. In the recent Ashes in cricket the issues with Stokes, Bairstow and Duckett took centre stage.

A number of American sports scientists suggest that the helmets and padding are part of the problem. They allow players to hit harder and the concussion comes from the brain hitting the inside of the skull rather than the skull being hit. One suggested answer is to do away with all the protective gear.
In Rugby League we could introduce zero tolerance for head contact but relatively few tackles involve the defender throwing themselves forward in quite the same way. A second possibility is to reduce the number of interchanges to make forwards play more minutes and so value stamina above explosive body mass. In the past players were less massive and this would benefit good little uns over the behemoths of today.

The helmet offers no protection to the brain, it only protects the skull. There is a film called concussion on this topic which is quite interesting.

It is an important Study but your "irritation" shows that you don't think it is as you'd like to see it beneath the season start and first round match results.

The BBC have covered concussion in many other sports including Union and IFAIK, all of these "investigative" stories have all been o the sports landing page....the same story about Roberts also features on the online sports pages of Wigan Today, The New Zealand Herald, Rocksport radio, the Daily Telegraph AU and rlhttp://www.ashburtononline.co.nz/rl......it is on these and many other sites because it is a very important news item......ittitating to you or otherwise

As for the "agenda" at the BBC........are you perchance wearing a tin foil hat?

In a heavy tackle it is often the impact of the head hitting the ground that causes the concussion.

We seem to get more head injuries from "friendly fire" these days
A lot of high tackles that get penalised these days would have passed without comments years ago.

Sure the story was the NFl brought the guy in the discount the effect collisions had on the brain but his report was totally against what they thought then the NFL tried to discredit him when he came up with his findings.

Also thought heading the ball in football was causing brain damage or early one of the reasons why many ex-footballers suffer from mental illness after their career has finished, or at least brain damage.

Even a modern gridiron helmet have a very hard time in preventing concussions from a head strike hence in part why they banned the head to head for undefended players and obviously mostly based on the evidence uncovered (despite the NFLs best attempts to hide what they already knew). As previously mentioned all helmets do is make the wearers feel more invincible and so take more risk, this is known as risk homeostasis or more commonly risk compensation.

The negative side of wearing helmets has been seen in cycling on a massive scale, not just in ordinary folk but also in racing/sporting circles (double the number of deaths post helmet compulsion in the pro ranks alone), you're more at risk of having a head injury (& any injury of any part of the body) as a helmet wearer than a non wearer.
Helmet advocates will insist that's untrue, they will link to debunked/flawed studies and meta analysis but all the respected peer reviewed studies and data prove categorically that wearing helmets only make matters worse not just individually but at mass/population levels too.
That bicyclists sans helmet have fewer head injuries than people on foot per hour of exposure and that the biggest head injury numbers come from motorists gives an indication as to how the thinking is skewed with respect to helmet wearing.

So, rugby league, yup, players will get concussions, how can you reduce that, greater education both at a younger level (wearing headguards for kids is a BIG mistake IMHO) and enforcing the rules more strictly re reckless tackles/contact, HOWEVER, unless you fundamentally change how the sport is you are always going to have clashes and accidental, non reckless strikes to the head. You can't cut out the reckless or sometimes the deliberate head contact either but penalising outcomes instead of intent doesn't help with respect to how players think about what they are doing.

Re headguards, it's being proven time and again that children are particularly vulnerable to risk compensation, just like putting cycle helmets on them which makes matters worse because they end up taking far more risk, putting headgear on kids playing RL is just a big, big mistake and fails to understand the limitations of the protection re TBIs and how it does increase incident rates because they are throwing themselves into situations more recklessly because they think they are more protected and end up with more head injuries as a consequence, exactly replicating what happened in gridiron and cycling.

They tackle with their heads/helmet, head-on-head tackles at sprinters pace:
INhttps://youtu.be/HEITsfVpie0OUT

...and yet some people don't understand why shoulder charges have effectively been banned out of the game. It isn't and never was due to individual shoulder charges, but that not penalising (and in fact celebrating) massive hits which clearly lead to concussion would open the sport to reasonable claims that it deliberately ignored player welfare with respect to head injuries - in turn massively increasing the sport's financial exposure to being sued by former players suffering from long-term effects.

I'd love to read any peer-reviewed studies on helmets safety in Cycling. I myself have had 4 or 5 serious falls over the years resulting in head collisions with the floor or tress while mountain biking. I personally don't like wearing them but I know from my own experience they've saved my head on quite a few occasions. Particularly because previously (nothing to do with cycling) about 20 years ago I cracked my skull badly, making my brain bleed, put me in a coma for a week, which also gave me meningitis to boot.

Obviously, I'm slightly different because I use a full face helmet a lot of the time when downhill MTB'ing and have been saved a few times when my head has smashed straight into trees at high speed or the floor, just leaving the helmet cracked or smashed. I also on my way to a trail a few years ago in Scotland was hit on my handlebars by a car and went over them and my head hit a curb, again I went to the hospital for precautions but the helmet saved me once again and although it was a MIPS helmet it was what you'd call a standard MTB helmet, rather than full-face downhill jobbie. Me personally I stay away from riding on the roads as much as possible, too many idiots that think it's funny to clip your handlebars.

I've read a few studies about cyclists in towns/cities who wear helmets and high vis clothing, not getting the same car room when they overtake that a non-helmet non-high vis clothing does, that can lead to accidents.I know Cyclists with helmets have said that drivers are more aggressive & give them less space to operate, and are generally more likely to ignore safety measures when sharing the road with a helmeted cyclist. but that's a bit of a different story. I've also read a few articles about helmet riders riding above their respective talents causing more injuries as well.

Anyway luckily in our Country compared to say, Aus, which apparently the helmet law has had a huge effect on the number of people that take up cycling over the years Downunder particularly in females, you can choose whether to wear a helmet or not.

Anyway, just a quick question do you cycle yourself in any form (road, trail, downhill etc) and have you had the misfortune to put the helmet, no helmet to the test yourself?

You think they've saved your head ..but from what, the maximum in lab testing proves that even on the strongest part the top bit, it struggles to lower the forces from a simple trip type fall/low speed incident to below that were concussion occurs. It might save you some minor bruising and lacerations but the reality is they do diddly squat.
Those who wear helmets most definitely have more incidents copared to those that don't, even in racing circles helmets have done nothing except make cycle racing more dangerous/crashy and more prone to death despite all the improvements across the board with better brakes, better tyres, better marshalling/warnings, on course medi care etc.

A cracked helmet is a failed helmet, that applies as much to a full face as it does for a road type helmet, for a helmet to work even remotely the same as the testing in lab it MUST compress. What tends to happen is that helmets split/are wrecked due to the high forces and this far exceeds the limitations, a rider will pronounce it 'saved them' all the whilst ignoring that when that happens (the wrecked/split helmet) fails to fully compress which means it doesn't even reach the in lab (best case scenario) reductions which as I said even at low speeds aren't enough to reduce the forces imparted on the brain to below a simple concussion threshold.

Add into which the additional weight on the head which has a noticeable difference when coming off at speed to what happens to your head AND the additional circumference which again increases the chance of hitting your head at all.
Add in a massive dollop of risk compensation (this applies to children particularly but also racing/competitive types) and allied with the inability of helmets to actually prevent what some (but not manufacturers) claim is precisely why we have not just a zero increase in safety for people on bikes (despite other interventions and lower incident rates for pedestrians) but actually it has a negative effect on safety.

I've been a mainly road rider for 30+ years covering around 190,000 miles in various countries and eveything from high density/high speed roads for commuting, utility and fast weekend riding to touring, though I've never raced (guys my size usually don't do well even if I had the talent.lol). I've come down alpine passes at circa 55mph and done a little bit of DH/trail riding BITD but again just for leisure but haven't done any for years.

I've never worn a helmet ever and wearing one would have killed me in my one big off as it most certainly would have snapped my head back and definitely my head would have hit the ground due to the extra circumference thus my brain would have been sloshed around badly not to mention the likelihood of a broken neck.

I've been struck by vehicles a couple of times, ran into by a ped from the side of the road and have a couple of fractured elbows and usual grazing for my troubles, near misses are a daily obstacle but you get hardened to it, I've been running the gauntlet with HGVs on the daily commute since I was 17 when drivers were far better behaved.

I'm an advocate for road safety and know pretty much all the studies including those by certain types whom are state sponsored like Jake Olivier who shouted loudly how great helmets were despite using flawed methodology and lying about the head injury counts (he uses such minor injuries as a cut lip by a non helmet wearer as a head injury) and dismissing his own advice on meta analysis so that he could match his findings to that of his sponsors that being NSW state government. A state who set up police stings so they can fine people not riding with helmets to $400 a go (same a s speeding) and $100 fines for no bell ffs but ignore the carnage caused by drivers.

Malta have just removed their helmet law so it leaves Canada, Jersey, Aus/NZ, some states in 'murica and the racing fraternity to wake up to the fact that helmets are the 2nd worst thing to happen to cycling since motorvehicles could go above 10mph.
Even the boxing world woke up to the fact that wearing headgear only increased the concussion rates.

No offense but apart from asking you if your head has taken the no helmet smash to the floor, I just asked you to point me in the direction of the peer-reviewed papers on cycling helmets because I'd be interested to read anything like that.
It was obvious from your previous post your feelings about cycling helmets. By the way, it wasn't just me that said that the helmet saved my head and potentially my life, especially already having a cracked skull before, it was the Doctor in the hospital., Which when you consider I've hit my head on both trees at about 30mph and rock at 20mph, I'd agree. Also, the thing that put me in a coma and nearly killed me years ago, was when someone scumbag hit me with a piece of wood around my head, wish I had a helmet that day!

cyclehelmets.org/ to get you started

cyclehelmets.org/ to get you started