Objective: Although helmet-wearing is important to prevent traumatic brain injury from bicycle -related accident, there is a lack of an investigation on the actual helmet-use rate in Korea. This study aimed to ascertain the actual helmet-wearing rate and which demographic factors affect helmet-wearing in Korean bicycle riders.
Subjective & Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using the public data from the sixth Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2013 and 2014 (n = 15,568). Helmet-users were defined as subjects who have worn helmets always, usually, and frequently when cycling. Demographic factors that are expected to affect the helmet-use included sex, age, area of residence, income, education, subjective health status, body mass index (BMI), and marital status. The independent effects of helmet use were determined using odds ratios (OR) adjusted for 5 demographic factors (sex, age, income, subjective health status, and BMI) by multivariate logistic regression analysis.
Results: Among the total population, 4,103 people were bicycle riders and 782 people (19.1%) were bicycle helmet-users. Bicycle helmet-users had higher mean age and sex ratio (M/F) than the non-helmet-users (P < 0.001 and P = 0.007, respectively). Among all age groups, teenagers showed lowest bicycle helmet-use rate (8.8%) while preschool children and middle aged-elderly showed higher bicycle helmet-use rate (19.0% and 26.2%, respectively). Bicycle riders who have high income, very good subjective health status, and with normal BMI tended to use bicycle helmet more frequently than other groups (Table 1). The adjusted logistic regression model revealed that female sex (OR 0.711 and P < 0.001), teenager (OR 0.469 and P = 0.001), low income (OR 0.664 and P = 0.005), poor subjective health status (OR 0.594 and P=0.008), and normal BMI (OR 0.700, P=0.016) were significantly associated with non-helmet-users (Table 2).
Conclusion: High frequency of non-helmet users were noted on female, teenager, normal BMI, low income, and poor-health-status groups among bicycle riders. Thus, education and advertisement about the importance of helmet-use should be focused on these population groups. |
