A look back over the last 20 years shows that many children still have bicycle accidents. It is particularly common in boys between the ages of 10 and 15. Almost 90 percent of children who fractured their skulls while riding a bike were not wearing a helmet.
In the US, more than 1 million children have broken bones while riding bicycles in the past 20 years. Despite efforts to make roads more bicycle-friendly, over 65,000 of the injuries involved motor vehicles, Dr. J Todd R. Lawrence of Children’s Hospital Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Society of Pediatrics.
There was an average of 50,975 broken bones every year, almost 72 percent of them in boys. Only a few children with skull fractures had worn a helmet: almost 87 percent of them had been out and about without a helmet at the time of the accident. Although the number of broken bones in children while riding bicycles has decreased over the past two decades, there has been a significant increase in 2020. This is consistent with other studies that have described higher numbers of other injuries during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is possible that more children rode bicycles during this time because school and other leisure activities were canceled.
“The results of our study indicate that further efforts are needed to educate people about road safety and to promote helmet wearing. Additional efforts should be directed at the most affected demographic, namely 10- to 15-year-old boys,” Lawrence said.