The Role of Probability and Statistics in Bicycle Helmet Research

Bicycle helmets have been consistently shown to be efficacious in biomechanical studies and effective in epidemiological studies of crash data to mitigate the risk of head injury. However, there is still an ongoing debate regarding the appropriateness of case-control studies of crash data, the possibility of a mediating factor such as risk compensation, and whether bicycle helmet legislation leads to fewer people cycling. In this paper, it will be demonstrated that better understanding of statistics and probability can help us differentiate which of these questions already have reasonable answers and which ones require further research.