Car Accident Injuries Weakens the Neck
Injury From Auto Accident Weakens the Neck
Rear-end collisions, even at low speed, can be extremely violent. Through the use of live subjects in crash tests involving rear-end collisions, scientists discovered that persons who experience head accelerations can experience up to nine G-forces, which is a speed nine times that of the force of gravity. What this implies is a person’s head, which usually weighs approximately 10 pounds, all of a sudden weighs 90 pounds. In its most basic version, whiplash is explained as: a person’s body is pushed one way, while the person’s head is pushed the opposite way. It comes as no surprise that much of the injury occurs in the ligaments that join the vertebrae that lie in-between the torso and the head, in the neck. The truth is, the pressures on the ligaments of the spine are in the upper area.
This issue was viewed specifically by Ivancic and colleagues(1) at Yale University. They discovered that while performing an example collision, the pressure in the lower part of the neck was 269.5 Newtons, or nearly 60 pounds of pressure, in approximately 1/20 of a second. This is the fact: when the strains are concentrated in such a small area, the human spine is not built to handle it. Research has shown that these forces are much more powerful than those that would normally act on the ligaments holding the spine together. There was a closer look at whiplash effects on the ligaments of the spine with a new study(2) by the same researchers at Yale.
The investigators began with 12 spines from cadavers: six of these spines had experienced a simulation of whiplash acceleration, while the others served as the control group. Each facet joint was then tested after being removed from the spines, in order to determine if the laxity of the joints varied between the two groups. This attached graph displays the contrast in joint stretch in the two sections. It’s apparent that the whiplash-damaged ligaments were severely weaker than non-injured ligaments.
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