The relationship between road traffic collision dynamics and traumatic brain injury pathology

Claire Baker, Phil Martin, Mark H. Wilson, Mazdak Ghajari, David Sharp

Brain Communications, 2022

Abstract

Road traffic collisions are a major cause of traumatic brain injury. However, the relationship between road traffic collision dynamics and traumatic brain injury risk for different road users is unknown. We investigated 2065 collisions from Great Britain’s Road Accident In-depth Studies collision database involving 5374 subjects (2013–20). Five hundred and ninety-five subjects sustained a traumatic brain injury (20.2% of 2940 casualties), including 315 moderate–severe and 133 mild–probable injuries. Key pathologies included skull fracture (179, 31.9%), subarachnoid haemorrhage (171, 30.5%), focal brain injury (168, 29.9%) and subdural haematoma (96, 17.1%). These results were extended nationally using >1 000 000 police-reported collision casualties. Extrapolating from the in-depth data we estimate that there are ∼20 000 traumatic brain injury casualties (∼5000 moderate–severe) annually on Great Britain’s roads, accounting for severity differences. Detailed collision investigation allows vehicle collision dynamics to be understood and the change in velocity (known as delta-V) to be estimated for a subset of in-depth collision data. Higher delta-V increased the risk of…

Cite as (BibTeX)

@article{baker-2022-the-relationship-between-road,
  title={The relationship between road traffic collision dynamics and traumatic brain injury pathology},
  author={Claire Baker and Phil Martin and Mark H. Wilson and Mazdak Ghajari and David Sharp},
  journal={Brain Communications},
  year={2022},
  doi={10.1093/braincomms/fcac033}
}