Laden with emotion, information and conversation, symposium keeps helmet safety at the forefront
“Many people emphasize with the daily struggle, but it’s hard to real that the struggle is all day every day. Speaking is hard. Walking is hard. I had to learn to eat with my left hand, and that’s not pretty,” Courtney King-Dye, speaking about her traumatic brain injury at the Riders4Helmets Symposium.
Leaders from a dozen facets of the horse industry gathered in West Palm Beach, Florida on January 14th to discuss helmet safety, assess progress, and discuss next steps at the 3rd Riders4Helmets Safety Symposium.
Since Olympic dressage rider Courtney King-Dye’s helmetless fall from a horse in March 2010 became the catalyst for helmet awareness, momentum for widespread helmet safety in the United States has continued to grow
The seemingly straightforward bottom line: a rider is safer with a helmet than without one, is actually a complicated, multi-layered issue even further confounded by the intricacies of each equestrian discipline.
Led by Dr. Craig Ferrell, USET Team Physician and FEI Medical Committee Chair, Lyndsey White of Riders4Helmets, and a host of experts, the Symposium examined those issues and discussed next steps.
Should helmet laws be enacted? Will Western riders ever embrace helmet wearing? How can riders be educated on proper helmet fit and concussion prevention? The 50 symposium participants passionately delved into each issue.
False Marketing?
Kemi O’Donnell, a mother of three from Connecticut, choked back tears and described how her oldest daughter Christen died in 1998 after a fall from a horse. Christen was wearing a non-ASTM/SEI certified hunt cap, which Kemi had believed was a safety helmet when she purchased it.
She’s since become a passionate advocate for consumer awareness regulations that would outlaw the sale of unapproved hunt caps under the category of helmet. She made the striking point that 100% of equestrian vendors sell hunt caps in the same online and physical category as helmets, even though hunt caps are formally classified as apparel and provide no protection in the event of a fall.
Kemi has attempted to pass the Christen O’Donnell Equestrian Helmet Safety Act into law on three separate occasions from 2004 to 2006. The Act would require that the Consumer Product Safety Commission establish minimum requirements for all equestrian helmets in the United States. The Act has been rejected each time.
“You can’t buy a bike helmet or any other type of helmet that does not meet safety standards,” said Kemi. “Yet when a hunt cap looks like a helmet and is sold as such it’s false marketing. I believe that no consumer should be able to walk into a store and buy this unless it’s categorized as a piece of apparel.”
In Memory of Nicole
In another case of a parent channeling their heartbreak into positive change, Gary Hornstein of Plantation, Florida related the series of events that led to the death of his daughter in 2006. Nicole was an outgoing 14 year old who was out on a trail ride with her trainer, who had allowed her to mount up helmetless. Nicole and the trainer traded horses midway through the ride, and Nicole fell from the flighty horse after a car passing by spooked it. For 20 days Nicole was kept alive, but she couldn’t survive her head injuries and passed away.
Gary spent three years pursuing a Florida state law that requires children 16 and under to wear a helmet while riding. He was a staunch helmet advocate before Nicole’s death, and believes that her accident could have been prevented had her trainer been required by law to make sure Nicole was wearing her helmet.
“When Nicole died, I promised her that no family or kid would ever have to go through what we were going through,” related Gary. “At her funeral I made it known that I would make it a law that no kid would be able to go without a helmet. It took me three years, but I learned that if you’re determined you can do anything. I did it for my daughter. She was worth it.”
A Long Way to Go
Dr. Alan Sills of Vanderbilt University’s Vanderbilt Sports Concussion Center has the unique talent of putting complicated medical subjects into laymen’s terms, and his talk on the causes, symptoms and treatments of concussions and traumatic brain injuries was engaging and thought provoking.
It’s a surprising statistic that horseback riding that causes 11.7% of all TBIs among all recreational sports, which is higher than any other recreational sports. There is not a wealth of comparative studies on the risks of horseback riding compared to other sports, but Dr. Sills pointed out that one Australian study from 2007 suggests horseback riding is more dangerous than riding a motorcycle.
Dr. Sills reviewed symptoms of traumatic brain injuries that really should be common knowledge to anyone who is participating in an activity where there’s risk.
“You’d be surprised how hard concussions are to diagnose,” he pointed out.
There are no standardized concussion grade classifications to help diagnose the severity of concussions. Instead doctors classify concussions depending on factors such as the nature of the injury, a player’s age and past history.
“We think computerized neurocognitive testing is very important,” he added. “When you have a concussion, things change in your brain that can be measured.”
Researchers and sports medicine professionals like the ImPACT test, which includes baseline testing at the beginning of an athlete’s season, so that if the athlete does suffer a concussion, they can measure how long it takes the brain to come back to its baseline. ImPACT is a very sensitive way to manage the symptoms of concussion, and this method has already been implemented by USEF, which has been able to do baseline testing on almost all of the high performance riders with USEF, thanks to Dr. Craig Ferrell.
By far the most effective strategy to prevent severe brain injury is not returning to play before the initial injury is fully healed. Clearly the use of helmets helps prevent traumatic brain injuries, and there are multiple examples worldwide of a reduction of brain injuries after mandatory helmet legislation was introduced.
Make It Cool
Other sports such as skiing and snowboarding have gone from zero helmet use to making helmet-wearing cool. These days, you just don’t see a professional athlete in snow sports ever competing or practicing without a helmet.
Cycling is another example where perception has changed dramatically; within five years the sport went from professional cyclers competing in cloth caps, to every member of the peloton in the Tour De France wearing a helmet.
“Leaders in each sport have to look at their own sport and try to promote change at the grassroots level,” Dr. Sills stated. “Organized sporting events with a high risk of head injury need to be attended to by medical personnel who are trained to diagnose and provide rapid treatment for brain injuries of all types.”
Tests other than clinical conversations with athletes are needed to diagnose and test for concussions. Genetic typing, biomarkers, serum concentration levels and functional MRI are all tools that are being researched and may be able to be used in the future to diagnose susceptibility for and severity of concussions.
More to Come
Look for continuing coverage of the 3rd Riders4Helmets Safety Symposium in the coming days. Continuing events of the day included the presentation of the first annual Helmet Hero Awards, a panel discussion by riders from all disciplines about next steps in helmet awareness, and in depth conversation about helmets in the Western world.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone working towards helmet safety!!!!