Abstract:
<p>Pediatric cervical spinal injuries are associated with high morbidity and mortality. Cervical injuries observed in the pediatric population appear to be age dependent with younger children experiencing more upper cervical level injuries compared to increased lower level cervical injury patterns to older children. The majority of pediatric cervical spinal injuries are motor vehicle crash related. Current progress in child occupant protection, including increased and proper restraint usage continues to reduce serious injury and fatalities to child occupants. However, improper restraint usage and incorrect child seating location, especially with children transitioning from rear-facing child restraints to forward-facing restraints is still a concern. Continued reductions in serious injury and fatalities to child occupants in survivable motor vehicle crashes will be based on continued education and improvements in child anthropometric test devices, child computational injury models and child restraint system design. Improvements in all of these categories are dependent on an improved understanding of the developmental biomechanics of the human cervical spine. Currently, limited data exist on human child neck biomechanics and none of the current cadaveric work has evaluated the biomechanical response over the entire age spectrum from birth to young adulthood. Numerous surrogate studies exist and have formed the basis of child injury criteria and developmental biomechanics, but have not been assessed in relation to the response of the pediatric human cervical spine. The current work investigates the biomechanics of the osteoligamentous human cervical spine from birth to young adulthood under tensile and bending loading environments. Tensile low-load and load-to-failure stiffness, load-to-failure, and flexion-extension bending stiffness increased with age. Tensile normalized displacement at failure and total bending low-load range of motion decreased with age. Viscoelastic rate effects are present in the pediatric cervical spine and are modeled with quasi-linear viscoelasticity. Peak load and loading energy increases with increased loading rate, while hysteresis energy is rate insensitive at lower loading rates, but increases at higher rates of loading. These data establish structural response behavior and injury thresholds for the osteoligamentous cervical spine by age. Additionally, they provide human data to assess the appropriateness of current surrogate models and current scaling techniques associated with these models. Finally, these data provide human response by age useful in progressing the biofidelity of computational and physical models for child occupant protection.</p>
