Youth, heads and motorcycle helmets
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From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Wearing a helmet can save young adult's heads in a motorcycle crash, and researchers at HHS' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality have numbers to show it.
Claudia Steiner and colleagues looked at data from 38 states on hospitalizations of youth under 21. She compared states that required every rider to wear a helmet with states that required only people under a certain age, such as 18 or 21, to wear one:
``Traumatic brain injury rates were higher in states that require riders only under a certain age to wear helmets.'' (6 seconds)
Steiner thinks that in states that don't require every rider to wear a helmet, some young people were going without one. She recommends universal helmet laws - and helmet-wearing.
The study was in the journal Pediatrics.
Learn more at hhs.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.