Less than 1% bike riders in crashes wear helmets: Study

NEW DELHI: In glaring evidence of how

two-wheeler crashes

have a high share in

traumatic brain injury

(TBIs) in India, a study at Christian Medical College in Vellore has revealed that over 70% of injuries were due to such accidents and less than 1% of patients were wearing a helmet at the time of crash.
The results of the study - based on patients admitted to the hospital and carried out over six and a half years from March 2013 to Sept 2019 - was published recently. The report gains significance considering that 77,539 two-wheeler occupants died in road crashes, which was nearly 45% of all road fatalities in 2023 in India. There has been an increase both in the number and share of two-wheeler occupants getting killed in road crashes in the past decade.
During the study, researchers identified 3,172 patients, of which 84% were males, who were admitted with TBI. Two-wheeler road traffic crashes caused 2,259 (71%) injuries and only 13 (0.6%) of these patients were wearing a helmet, as per the study. Around one-third of patients reported alcohol consumption.
The study paper - prepared by researchers from Cambridge University, CMC's neurological sciences department, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens - mentioned that the lesser causes of injury included falls (307), pedestrian-vehicle accidents (278) and four-wheeler road traffic accidents (163). The median time from injury to arrival at the emergency department was three hours and 1,093 patients were transferred from a referring hospital. While 1,162 (37%) patients experienced a mild injury, around 33% had moderate injuries and the remaining around 30% (968) had severe injuries.

While there were 174 (5%) inpatient deaths, the overall mortality was 540 (17%) in three to nine months. Among the inpatient mortalities, 82 died within two days of admission, 108 within four days, and 147 within eight days. Only around 4% patients had health insurance, and 31% patients were unable to cover their hospital expenses. The average hospital expenditure was Rs 35,850 and the average patient expenditure was Rs 28,900.
The report, in its conclusion, said, "In a high-volume tertiary care centre in India, we described a predominantly young male TBI population with a high contribution of two-wheeler road traffic accidents and significant post-discharge mortality. We also identified clinical features associated with inpatient mortality and found that existing prognostic models performed poorly when predicting which patients died after leaving hospital."
It added that a large proportion of TBI cases in low and middle income countries (LMICs) can be prevented or made less severe through

public health policies

, particularly those addressing road safety and access to pre-hospital care.