liisat First the 10 page pdf linked to is not a study. An aatbrsct, maybe, or a press release, and a translation at that. So it is hard to dig deep into the information presented, not that I'm qualified to do that anyway.I can help you out with their risk calculation though. It is fairly simple: previous to the introduction of a helmet law you have a # of cycling related injuries lets say 100* and a pool of cyclists lets say 1000* giving a risk of cycling related injury of 1/10 or 10%*. After the helmet law was introduced, cycling related head injuries did decrease by 22% to 78. Unfortunately the pool of cyclists decreased at the same time and by more then 22%. The paper states 29%. so now we have 78/710 or 11% (10.98 I'll over look the rounding) a 10% increase in risk (* numbers are made up picked simply for ease of illustration only). Simple, no?This is a pooled risk and doesn't relate to your personal risk of injury, which a helmet may help reduce. They address that in the section titled: School of thought 2: Theoretical research I can't really help you out with this section. As I read it they identify a some unspecified methodological errors in the previous meta‐study . These errors initially reduce the effectiveness of helmets at preventing injury from 45% to 15%. Further methodological errors reduce the effectiveness to zero. This seems unreasonable to me, but I can't evaluate methodological errors in meta-studies. It seems reasonable to assume some personal protection in-case of a fall So what to do; since it seems that mandatory helmet laws reduce cycling participation rates at rates greater then they prevent injury. So, as a public health measure helmet laws are not effective.
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