This brief report describes an investigation of the effects of using the Jacchia (1977) model in place of the Jacchia (1971) model for specifying the background gas pressure in the theoretical model of thermospheric helium described by Straus et al. (1977). Changes in the global transport of helium caused by a small increase in the latitudes at which the background gas pressure extrema occur lead to much better agreement of the model predictions with data taken by the mass spectrometers on board the Esro 4 and Ogo 6 satellites.