Men are more likely to die in car crashes, as they typically drive more miles and engage in risky behaviors like speeding and driving impaired. However, estimates show that when comparing men and women involved in crashes of similar severity, women have a greater risk of sustaining serious injuries or being killed.
To examine the inequalities of car design and the resulting injuries, researchers of a recent study used trauma injury data from car crash victims and evaluated the differences in injury patterns sustained by men and women involved in car accidents.
“We found that vehicle crash injury patterns and injury severity differ between men and women. We also show that women are arriving at the trauma bay with signs of shock more often than men, regardless of injury severity. These novel findings of sex differences in shock index mean we need to look further into how and why this is happening,” Dr. Susan Cronn, the first author of the study from the Medical College of Wisconsin, said in a news release. The findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.
The study also investigated if occupant crash systems work equally well for male and female bodies. For this, researchers used clinical injury data from more than 56,000 car crash victims. Half of the cases were women.
They noticed that even though men sustained more overall injuries, women had more pelvis and liver injuries. They also found that female victims surpassed a shock index greater than 1.0 more frequently than men, even in cases when they had fewer total or less severe injuries compared to men.
“An elevated shock index can be an early warning sign of hemorrhagic shock, caused by heavy blood loss, but can also be an early predictor of mortality,” the news release stated.
“Our findings might mean that women’s bodies have less capacity to function when physiological changes occur, that some injuries have more impact on female bodies, or that female bodies handle blood loss differently than…
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