Humanity is impractical: that’s why I own horses. Dangerous, expensive, potentially risky to one’s employment status and reputation as a good parent. Check! Faith and science, data-informed decisions and recklessness, and gluttony and dieting all go hand in hand. The airvest wearing population is not particularly data-adverse.
Has anyone any additional data about dangerous episodes with airvests? I recall one from a few years back referenced above, any others?
It’s strictly anecdotal, but I’ve seen quite a few people come off with air vests at shows in the last few years, and they have all gotten right up and walked away. No serious injuries in the maybe ~25-30 falls I’ve seen with them.
I think I even saw one person come off twice in the same day who got right up both times.
The data you request is part of the accident data collected by the USEA, USEF, and FEI. We are going through that. However, the most recent published data indicates that an airvest is associated with a 1.7 times INCREASE in severe to fatal injury on XC.
As for our hospital, we have a 7 state patient catchment with over 500,000 patients annual, 25,000 patients just in spine. I don’t have the time to conduct retrospective research (unless somebody wants to pay for it), outside of my NIH/NSF/Industry funded programs. And, it is illegal for me to discuss any specifics due to the patient privacy laws, even if deidenetified.
Isn’t that a completely separate subject from the effect of vests in a show ring with jumps that fall down easily? Instead of solid cross-country jumps?
That doesn’t really sound like a comparison of apples to apples.
I think the essence of what @RAyers is saying is that the air vest is not a magic talisman. For a long time, I think that people felt they were some sort of cloaking shield which prevented injury from any fall. The reality, in both XC and Stadium, is that they protect for certain injuries, not all injuries. And, they may have unintended side effects, that are still not fully understood. This has been true of all safety devices introduced in other sports with high G-force impacts (such as sports car racing).
It will be interesting to see what the experimental design is for the VT testing of air vests. I think this is much more difficult than the helmet tests.
Yes, I would imagine there will be a lot more variables involved than just head/ground.
I’ve personally seen a number of rider falls/ planned dismounts in which the rider failed to unhook where the vest didn’t go off at all, despite being (ostensibly) in working order/ well maintained, as well as one planned dismount where the rider failed to unhook and when the lanyard didn’t release ended up dangling from her very large horse. These happened with multiple brands of vests (Point Two, Hit Air, and Helite). None of these falls were serious. In the majority of them the rider was also wearing a traditional body protector.
Hearsay/ anecdote only for the most part, but the dangerous incidents I’ve heard about have included:
Horse and rider both fell (in at least one case not at a jump), horse got up and vest didn’t detach and rider was dragged. Several different cases of this happening.
Horse and rider both fell, vest didn’t deploy, and falling on the canister caused an injury.
Rider fell and the vest worked properly, however her heart stopped on impact, which the treating doctor felt was caused by the inflation of the airvest (similar to Damar Hamlin’s injury). Rider was successfully resuscitated in the field and medevacced and AFAIK did make a full recovery.
Thank you for this information.
It actually can be. There are statistical methods that can be used to control for fence type. A odds ratio with likelihood regression is one.
Also, given that XC now uses frangible devices, XC fences also fall when hit.
As easily as a rail in the show ring??
Thanks very much for this information! I didn’t expect the dragging issue, it seems like so much stress to put on the mechanism for it not to deploy or break. That it happened with multiple types of vest is certainly alarming.
In a post below, the VT study comes up. For what its worth, right before the helmet ratings came out, I bought a MIPS helmet based on info on COTH and some reading. Turned out to be one of the worst helmets they tested, according to those ratings, a lot worse than the Samshield it replaced.
RAyers, on the face of it, an ~2X increased likelihood of severe-to-fatal injury does sound pretty damning. Were that the case, you wouldn’t think they would be marketable as a safety device.
Is the paper you referenced available on line somewhere?
@George_T_Mule marketing and science are two different things. Marketing doesn’t have to reflect and real scientific or engineering principle nor does it have to make defendable claims at the moment. Airvests are no different than essential oils in terms of established efficacy.
Thanks RAyers
I read thru this paper, and pulled some numbers out of it to perhaps make it a bit more comprehensible.
This paper analyzes FEI data from 2015, 2016, and 2017, representing 3305 “falls”, and divides it into “no/slight injury” (3203 riders) or “serious/fatal injury” (102 riders) categories. No data was presented as to the nature of the “falls”, nor for the criteria of “No” and “Serious”.
For the sake of discussion, I’ll just propose “Falls” as mishaps where the rider or rider and horse wind up on the ground, and ‘no/slight injury’ as “fixed with a bandaid” and ‘serious/fatal injury’ as “earned a trip to the ER”. It doesn’t matter; insert your own definition.
One number I think is significant is that of the 3305 horse wrecks, 3203 riders (97%) got a bandaid. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Evidence that the various safety vests were working? Maybe.
Of the 102 serious wrecks (3%), 69 riders were wearing air vests, 33 riders were not. So approximately 2:1 against team air vest. Evidence the Air Vests were causing more severe injuries? Possibly/probably.
It was never mentioned, but as this data was from “Eventing” competition, I will assume that all 3305 of the fallen riders were wearing the required foam vests, and the air vest portion were wearing Air vests on top of the foam. Based on this, and granted the proposal that air vests “stiffen” the spine, I can only imagine that a foam vest plus an air vest stiffen it even more so, and further increase the potential for spinal damage. Fact or fiction? No Data.
So what does that “1.7X Increase” mean? It’s a real number, derived from real data, and does seem to indicate that (at least) wearing an air vest over a foam vest is less safe than just a foam vest alone.
How representative is this of real world/everyday riding? Well, I just don’t know. Obviously it doesn’t say anything about foam vs air vs no vest at all, or the nature of the “serious” falls, or the resulting injuries that might allow some degree of inference. The paper concludes with: “Riders wearing an air jacket were over represented in the percentage of serious or fatal injuries in falls compared to riders who only wore a standard body protector. Further research is needed to understand the reason(s) for this finding.”
So take it with a grain of salt. Yep: “The Jury is still out”.
Horses are dangerous beings. You can be maimed or killed leading one thru a gate. Put a saddle on one and climb aboard, your risk of death and destruction multiplies. Take up CrossCountry racing, and the risk goes exponential. Best advice is to stay on the other side of the fence. Second best is to wear safety gear appropriate to your riding ability/activity, and physical/psychological comfort level. Third best is don’t take up CrossCounty racing :-D.
Due to the certitude that there are numerous situations where an air vest isn’t at all helpful, a standard foam vest is almost inarguably your safest choice, even w/o the above data to consider. Anecdotal data is just that, but it does seem to indicate that an air vest can provide decent protection most of the time, in most situations, for most riders.
“No Warranty Expressed or Implied.”
I understand you’re trying to simplify what is being presented, however, your oversimplification leads to false assumptions.
Your first assumption is you are trying to use the data to prove an alternative hypothesis (airvests are safer). It is impossible to prove a negative hypothesis unless you have matched controls for paired testing. An analogy of what you are doing is saying if 97 out of 100 Blue cars didn’t get in a bad accident, painting your care blue must be safe. So your question, “that’s a good thing?” Assumes that it had an airvest not been worn things would be worse. However, you can not prove that.
One can only look at the data. We can not make a-priori or a-postiori assumptions trying to make the data fit our own internal biases. That is what a true scientist does.
The biomechanics of a “foam” vest are different than an airvest. The fit is also quite different. The best demonstration of this would be to do a tuck and roll with both. This study does not cover that. However, if we use other biomechanical studies where people were similar devices as in motorcycle racing we can extrapolate possible reasons for the increase. But testing is really the only way.
A good example of a true study of accidents and injury prevention is MotoGP. For 11 years they instrumented every rider and bike to measure the forces imparted in every racing accident so they could develop the best racing leathers possible. Alpinestars in conjunction with MotoGP spent upwards of $12million but the result is a rider today can survive a crash like this:
Of course an Alpinestars set of racing leathers costs $12k. But it is an example of true research to answer a very specific problem. This include airbag technology where inbuilt sensors (they do not allow a lanyard that attaches a rider directly to the bike) detect the rider separating from the bike to activate the nitrogen cartridge (there are 2 to allow for multiple crashes). It also requires the airbags to deflate within 15 seconds or so to enable the rider to get back on the bike and continue racing.
As a person who isn’t afraid to use themselves as a test subject, I have a camera with accelerometers attached to my CO JL9 vest. And it does a pretty good job of measuring impacts in my falls.
Wouldn’t it be more effective to try to separate out the data based on the actual injury?
If somebody comes off a horse with a serious head injury that may or may not turn out to be be fatal, that doesn’t really have much to do with whether or not they were wearing an air vest, a foam vest, both vests, or neither.
Yes, however, in the US we have laws the prevent the public dissemination of patient records. That would include specific injury. It is fairly easy to connect specific injury to a specific patient. Thus, we have to both de-identify injury and create broad injury categories for these injuries and outcomes.
If the specific data was given to the sport governing bodies, then it becomes pretty risky that an employer, insurance company, can track your injuries versus activities. How do I know? Because this is how we collect medical data for research, but it is put behind secure firewalls similar to military secrets.
Thank you for all the information you share. I really appreciate you.
I wasn’t trying to offer proof. I said “Maybe.”
I don’t require proof that my air vest works. Personal experience gives me at least a modicum of expectation that it will, and I’m not planning on going the foam vest route because they are uncomfortable. I have fallen w/o the vest and it hurt. I have fallen with it, and it didn’t. I merely accept that it will, or it won’t, and do my level best to stay in the saddle.
Off topic, but I consider it important to 1) choose a mild mannered, more or less unflappable critter as a riding companion, and 2) develop a bond such that I can anticipate spooks and such, and mitigate before it gets to the problem stage. IMO, this is at least as much the key to riding safety as any amount of protective gear. I generally refrain from proselytization, and I only mention it here to demonstrate that we are starting with a different set of initial conditions.
“Proof? We don’ need no stinkin’ proof . . .” :-D.
I don’t look at his Facebook page too often, but the very famous eventer Denny Emerson will pretty regularly bring up the subject of having an animal that is suitable for the rider’s skill level.
That is one of the most important lessons to learn, and some people just never seem to learn it.
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