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Specific patterns of bicycle accident injuries - An analysis of correlation between level of head trauma and trauma mechanism
Möllmann, Rieger, Wassmann
Objective
Compared to the efforts made in understanding the mechanisms of car accidents and their injury patterns, much less is known about these factors for cyclists. Consequently a series of protection systems for car drivers have been developed. Similar innovations relating to bicycles are rare. The identification of typical types of cyclists' injuries should help us understand their specific risks. In this evaluation we focused on head trauma.
Methods
Accident mechanisms, treatment and outcome in head trauma patients were evaluated in a standarized prospective multicenter study. For follow-up, patients were interviewed one year after incident using a standarized questionnaire.
Results
A total of 3395 head trauma patients were enrolled in this evaluation, 337 (10%) of them suffered a bicycle traffic accident. Other types of trauma mechanisms were related to leisure time (36%), housework (28%), business (15%) and non-bicycle traffic accidents (11%). The bicycle accident patients had a significantly highe
r rate of mid-level head trauma (GCS 9-12) than with other accident mechanisms, which reveals this type of injury is related to bicycle traffic accidents in a specific way. 89% of the cyclist were not wearing helmets.
There was no significant difference concerning the level of head-trauma due to bicycle accident between cyclists wearing a helmet and others.
Conclusions
Since cyclists are shown to have a higher risk of mid-level head trauma than all other trauma patients and
bicycle helmets seem not to be sufficient to reduce the level of head trauma the helmets should be improved and new protection systems need to be developed.
http://www.adfc-weimar.de/download/Radfahrerhelme.pdf:
Anhang anzeigen 566887
