You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

XML
Original article
Effects of body protection vests and experience levels in prevention of equestrian injuries
  1. Sarah A Andres1,2,
  2. Adrienne M Bushau-Sprinkle2,3,
  3. Michael E Brier1,
  4. Yvette R Seger2,4
  1. 1 Department of Medicine, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA
  2. 2 United States Pony Clubs, Lexington, Kentucky, USA
  3. 3 Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA
  4. 4 Office of Public Affairs, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
  1. Correspondence to Sarah A Andres; sarah.andres{at}louisville.edu

Abstract

Objectives To investigate the risk reduction and benefit of wearing body protection/safety vests in equestrian sports.

Methods A comparison of equestrians wearing body protective vests and those not wearing vests was performed using incident report data of 718 participants in the United States Pony Clubs during 2011–2017. Data obtained included age, gender, certification level of member, type of activity, description of incident, description of injuries, what protective equipment was worn and other possible contributing factors.

Results While wearing body protective vests when riding on the flat or for show jumping was not correlated with a decrease in injuries, wearing vests for cross country was correlated with decrease in reported injuries (p=0.036) and showed a trend towards a lower incident severity level (p=0.062). Wearing body protection during cross country reduced the relative risk of injury by 56%. While the volume of incidents varied with a rider’s experience level, the number of serious injuries did not appear to correlate with lesser equestrian experience.

Conclusions While equestrian sports are considered to have a certain degree of risk associated with them, there are ways to make them safer. Wearing safety equipment, such as helmets and body protection, and obtaining education and experience can lessen the chance of incurring serious injuries.

  • equestrian
  • injury
  • prevention
  • protection

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2018-000426

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors All coauthors of the manuscript have fulfilled the following criteria: substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data; drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; final approval of the version published; agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Not required.

    • Ethics approval Our retrospective study was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Louisville (17.0290) and was determined to not meet the ‘Common Rule’ definition of human subjects’ research.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.