Sledding kids should use hockey helmets: researcher

OTTAWA — An Ottawa- based neurosurgeon says research he’s done shows hockey helmets are the most effective at preventing serious head injuries to children tobogganing, out of three different types of head protection often used for such activity.

That’s the finding of an experiment led by Dr. Michael Vassilyadi, a neurosurgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and professor at the University of Ottawa, who tested helmets designed for hockey, downhill skiing and bicycling.

Vassilyadi and his team simulated in a laboratory the typical impact that might occur while tobogganing with these helmets, they report in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.

They found hockey helmets most protective at two, four and six metres per second, while a bicycle helmet worked best at the highest speed of eight metres per second.

“The hockey helmet is the winner at most velocities, and then the cycling helmets for the highest,” Vassilyadi said in an interview. However, he added that the highest speed tested — the equivalent of almost 30 kilometres per hour — is an unsafe speed for young children to be tobogganing at.

Another positive aspect of hockey helmets, Vassilyadi noted, is the option for installing face shields on them.

“When I see the children at the hospital, the majority of them have injuries to the face,” he said. “A lot of times they have torn lips, they have broken teeth, they have a broken nose, they have an eye- globe injury. That’s because they fell forward, tobogganing into an object.”

Ultimately, any helmet is better than none for tobogganing, which does not have a helmet designed specifically for it, Vassilyadi said. However, he added that he’d like to see a helmet created primarily for outdoor winter activities, like tobogganing and skating.

While a hockey helmet is the best option for such activities, Vassilyadi said its drawbacks include the lack of protection it provides against highspeed collisions and the fact it does not adequately keep the wearer’s head warm, as a ski helmet does.

Vassilyadi said the relatively poor showing of ski helmets in this study is not indicative of how effective they are in skiing.

He explained that collisions in tobogganing are usually to the front of the head, while ski incidents most often involve impacts to the side of the head, in which ski helmets proved most effective among the three helmets tested in this experiment.