Steve Timko
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
1/9/2005 11:35 pm
DETAILS
Helmet usage by skiers and snowboarders by geographic area in 2001-02 ski season:
* Colorado: 22.4 percent.
* Southwest: 16.5 percent.
* Northwest: 23.2 percent.
* California: 15.0 percent.
Source: “Prevalence and diffusion of helmet use at ski areas in Western North America in 2001-02,” published in the Injury Prevention journal.
On a beautiful day at Heavenly Valley, Anita Alger tried to scoot past two snowboarders as she skied from one slope to another.
The snow caught her ski wrong, and Alger tumbled over the edge of the hillside. In the course of making two full turns and coming to a rest 60 feet below, Alger, who was wearing a helmet, smacked her head against a boulder.
“It was like it was in slow motion,” Alger said in recalling the accident, which occurred when she was not even going downhill. “I saw it through my goggles. The boulder hit me right above my right eyebrow. It hit hard. I thought I had cracked my skull.”
While longtime skiers say helmet usage has increased, they’re not universally accepted.
Alisha Lynn Main, 13, of Carson City died Dec. 27 while snowboarding without a helmet at Heavenly Mountain Resort’s Skyline Trail. Her father found her next to a tree. Investigators believe she ran into it.
A study published last year in Injury Prevention journal surveyed 6,400 skiers and snowboarders at 29 ski areas in the western United States and Canada for helmet usage. The ski area of California and Nevada ranked last for helmet usage among four geographical areas, with about two in every 13 skiers and snowboarders using them, the report said.
Helmets have a fan in Alger.
“If I didn’t have that helmet on, I have no doubt I wouldn’t be talking about this now,” Alger said.
She got the helmet the previous Christmas primarily to set an example for her children.
She and her husband, KTVN Channel 2 meteorologist Mike Alger, require their children to wear helmets on the slopes.
“I thought it was the silliest thing — a middle-aged woman who doesn’t ski that hard wearing a helmet,” Anita Alger said.
Instead of the impact’s force being focused on one spot, her helmet diffused the impact, she said.
Her forehead swelled, and she was left with two badly swollen black eyes. That forced her to wear sunglasses until the swelling subsided.
“I looked like a Klingon afterwards,” she said, adding she did not go to the doctor.
Two researchers who studied injuries at a Vermont ski slope contend helmets reduce the risk of cuts and bruises from accidents but do little to save lives or reduce serious injuries. But the conclusions are strongly contested by others in the medical community.
Jasper E. Shealy, professor emeritus of industrial engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, said he doesn’t oppose the use of ski helmets. Bur he said there’s no data that show mandatory use of helmets will reduce deaths or serious injury.
“If you don’t want to sustain a scalp laceration, then by all means wear a helmet,” Shealy said.
This season, he knows of six skiing and snowboarding deaths from accidents, and three of the people wore helmets. That’s in line with previous years when in about 60 percent of the cases, the people who died wore helmets, Shealy said.
His study clocked the speed of 650 skiers and snowboarders on a Vermont slope. It showed on average that skiers and snowboarders wearing helmets go 3 mph faster than people without helmets, Shealy said.
He wonders whether wearing helmets alters the behavior of skiers.
Another problem, Shealy said, is that skiers and snowboarders travel at high speeds, typically faster than bicyclists or football players who also wear helmets.
A high-speed impact with a tree is “such a massive event from an energy point of view that it would take more than a helmet to save lives,” Shealy said.
But two Colorado neurosurgeons conclude that helmets reduce the risk of sustaining a brain injury of any kind by about 60 percent to 65 percent and mean an 80 percent reduction in fatalities, Dr. Stewart Levy said.
He and Dr. John Nichols, both of the InterMountain Neurosurgery and Neuroscience in Denver, plan to publish an article reviewing 701 traumatic head injuries caused by skiing and snowboarding.
Their information shows helmets are best at reducing injuries when one skier or snowboarder hits another, Levy said. Injuries from collisions with trees are next, he said.
Helmets seem to help the most in these cases because they turn what could be a direct impact into more of a glancing blow, Levy said. And instead of the energy being focused in one point, it’s spread out more over the head — as Alger described.
Even when a severe injury results from a collision, a helmet can lessen the severity, Levy said.
Micky Collins, assistant director of the sports medicine concussion program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, also advocates helmets for skiers.
Collins, who assists the National Football League and the National Hockey League in developing safer helmets, agrees with Shealy that there’s not a lot of data supporting the safety of ski helmets.
But the data suggest that since helmets became more popular on slopes, skiers and snowboarders have concussions instead of more serious injuries, such as fractures or bleeding inside the skull, Collins said.
“A concussion, if managed appropriately, allows the brain to recover,” Collins said. The more serious injuries are often life threatening and can result in permanent disability.
Jim Zaloga, ski patrol director at Sugar Bowl, is a skier who doesn’t wear a helmet. Part of it has to do with his job.
“They’re fairly hot,” Zaloga said. “When you use radios, you don’t hear as well.”
Even when he skies for leisure, he doesn’t wear a helmet, he said.
But he still thinks helmets are a good idea.
“I’ve seen people take some pretty long falls,” Zaloga said. “They’re pretty messed up, but the helmet probably saved their lives.”
When the snow gets iced over, some of his ski patrol members who normally go without helmets will wear them, Zaloga said.
“In soft snow, if you hit your head hard, it makes a hole, and you’re going to be OK,” he said. “If you hit your head on hard snow, it can knock you out. It’s the difference between hitting a sponge and hitting a table.”
So why doesn’t he wear a helmet?
“I think it’s one of those old-dog-new-trick kind of things,” Zaloga said. “I keep meaning to buy one, and maybe I’ll buy one this year.”
