I swear Plaid Horse reminds me of Rita Skeeter (for any Harry Potter fans out there) the way articles get presented in that publication.
Whether or not the vests included in the 18 studies found met testing requirements is largely unknown as the brand and protection levels were not reported in the observational studies and results were variable in the experimental studies.
Given that this was based on observational studies, I’ll personally be waiting for a larger scale study before forming a more definitive opinion. Isn’t UVA supposed to be doing one similar to what they did for helmets? Or am I just imagining that?
I believe they are, but I don’t know if they have the funding organized for it yet.
I read the full, linked study (the PDF is at the bottom of that article) and it is wort the read. It is very upfront about it being an observational study but raises real concerns. Unfortunately, it is also not done any favors by the Plaid Horse article about it.
It is and does, but the problem I had with the writeup is you can provide concrete examples of problems, which do happen and do need to be studied further, but it didn’t seem to credit all the anecdotal experience of riders who would attest that they had falls where the vests absolutely kept them from being banged up. I don’t know how you scientifically study and document incidents where the vest deployed and the rider wasn’t hurt, because how can you establish what the result would have been without the vest, beyond just the rider recognizing that it hurt less than the times they hit the dirt without their vest?
There is an extremely strong bias to believe that the air vest was protective regardless of the severity of the fall. How many times have we seen someone quite badly injured say “oh good thing there was the air vest,” including cases where they were also wearing a foam body protector.
If air vests really help as much as people want to believe, the signal should not be hard to see. Even if they help against minor injuries but not against major injuries, that is disappointing. It seems like at best they are neutral and the evidence so far is concerning that they might be mildly negative.
Why would it? People fall off without air vests and avoid injury too, and it wouldn’t include those anecdotes either. Anecdotal experiences don’t have a control. There is no actual way to know the outcome if that person did not have an air vest on. They can credit the air vest with reducing injury, but there is no “control” where we have a comparison of the rider’s injuries without an air vest.
An observational study is still looking at data. Individuals falling off in an air vest without injury isn’t any valuable data without being able to replicate the fall without an air vest and compare the difference.
I think I remember the event rider Boyd Martin
making a comment that falling off with the air vest is like landing on a cloud compared to doing it without the vest. And he’s probably had more experience at falling off than a lot of other people. Lol.
But that’s still just his own anecdotal experience.
The issue about your statement is that I can claim my Carhartt arctic parka is just as effective as an air vest where I crashed out with no injury. This is why anecdotal evidence can only work in very very large numbers and undergoing rigorous statistical analyses which can’t be done yet due to the small numbers of documented instances.
Sadly the study didn’t get funded. I donated to it and they reached out to me to return my donation.
