Do riders who wear an air jacket in equestrian eventing have reduced injury risk in falls? A retrospective data analysis.

The research looks into whether wearing an air jacket reduces the risk of serious injury in equestrian events. The findings indicate that riders wearing an air jacket were over-represented when it came to serious or fatal injuries, with a 1.7 times higher likelihood of sustaining such injuries, compared to those not wearing an air jacket.

Objectives

• The purpose of this research was to study the association between air jacket usage and the severity of rider injuries when participants in global equestrian eventing competitions experience falls.

Methodology

• The researchers executed a retrospective analysis on the data provided by the Fédération Equestre Internationale. This data included injury records of 1819 riders who fell while wearing an air jacket and 1486 riders who fell without an air jacket from 2015 to 2017.
• The injury data was sorted into two categories: ‘no/slight injury’ and ‘serious/fatal injury’.
• A chi-square test was carried out to identify if there was an association between injury severity category and air jacket usage. Also, the binary logistic regression was used to find out the effect size of this association.

Results

• During the study period, 3203 riders sustained no/slight injuries, and 102 suffered serious/fatal injuries due to falls.
• While a majority, i.e., 55.0% of riders who fell were wearing an air jacket, they accounted for 67.6% of the serious/fatal injury outcomes.
• The use of an air jacket was found to have a significant association with serious/fatal injuries in falls (X² = 6.76; p = 0.009). The riders wearing an air jacket had 1.7 times (95%CI 1.14-2.64) increased odds of sustaining a serious or fatal injury in a fall as opposed to those riders not wearing an air jacket.

Conclusions

• Contrary to expectations, the riders who wore an air jacket were over-represented in the percentage of serious or fatal injuries in falls when compared to riders who wore only a standard body protector.
• Further research is needed to understand the reason behind these findings and the researchers recommended that additional data on injury outcomes, rider characteristics, fall biomechanics should be studied in future analyses. They also suggested that air jacket and body protector characteristics should be further investigated.