I read in the paper that a woman died on a California roller coaster this month. One of the big fast ones. Apparently, the ride caused an anyerism (sp?) to burst in her brain.

Has anyone else decided they're not worth the risk? How safe are these rides, anyway, and how fast is too fast?

I am a physician who noticed this story as well. Your personal risk is obviously infinitessimally small. Think about it. How many people ride coasters each year (total rides)? Millions, easily. How many die each year from aneurysms on coasters? Your risk of being killed in a car accident is dozens of times higher than your risk of being injured on a coaster.

With one possible exception. I read last year that there is growing concern among some neurologists that the rapid head jerking which occurs on coasters may actually produce microvascular trauma similar to that which is incurred during a boxing match, only on a much smaller scale. But for coaster addicts who ride perhaps hundreds of times per decade, there is concern that these individuals may eventually manifest signs of early onset dementia (a bit like 'punch drunk syndrome' among boxers, but less severe and less frequent). No reason for the casual rider to fret. And this is only relatively speculative and hypothetical at present.

A number of years ago, a friend was riding his off-road motorcycle when an aneurysm burst in his brain. It was originally listed erroneously as a fatal motorcycle accident. They determined later that he was essentially dead before the bike crashed.

A friend just had an aneurysm repaired in her brain. Basically they are a time bomb looking for a place to happen.

Think what would have happened if the aneurysm had burst if she had been on the highway with her children.

I used to love roller coasters. Now they kill my neck and back. Last time I felt it for a couple of weeks after the ride and I'm passing on them from now on. Age changes bone density which compacts spacial relationships of the structures in the back. When/ if your bones start to thin, you may really mess up your neck and back. It is a consideration for females especially as they may often have poor bone densities even before menopause from smoking, dieting etc. Ironically some atheletes that have done long term vigorous exercise (like track atheletes)also have extremely low bone density in their 20's because of how women atheletes metabolize minerals during strenuous exercise. It happens a lot more than the aneurysm. From what I read the woman who died had the aneurysum in the blood vessels in the chest, and the increased pressure in the chest cavity on fast descent was the suspected cause of the rupture. Aneurysms are super dangerous for all of us on the highway as the last poster noted. I had a life long male friend who died hitting a highway pillar but he was dead before the crash, just like the cyclist mentioned. He had an 18 wheeler and we were super glad he didn't take any other vehicle or pedestrian with him.

There was a really good article in one of the women's magazines -- maybe Family Circle -- about this topic last year.
The article profiled several persons who had died or suffered serious injuries while riding roller coasters -- not because they had fallen or because safety equipment failed, but because contemporary roller coasters exert so much more G-forces on the body than roller coasters from the 1980s and earlier.

As a result of the pressures and forces, they developed internal injuries with symptoms that were not immediately evident when they left the ride (like light internal bleeding) but that escalated in the following hours.

It was a convincing article. I avoid the super-G-loop head-rush roller coasters that the theme parks have installed in the past ten years. But put me on a early-20th-century woody, like the Giant Dipper in Santa Cruz, and I'm grinning all day.