Strength and Kinematic Response of Dynamic Cervical Spine Injuries

Mechanisms of cervical spine injury in rugby union: is it premature to abandon hyperflexion as the main mechanism underpinning injury?

“…For example, ex vivo work by Nusholtz et al showed that initial head and neck posture and impact angle can dictate postimpact head and neck displacements (ie, hyperflexion or hyperextension) and injuries 26. Pintar et al 30 41 42 and Liu and Dai43 showed that straightening the cervical spine away from natural lordotic posture prior to dynamic compression resulted in a stiffening of the spine and ultimately clinically relevant compression injuries from C4–C6. Camacho et al 44 showed in a computational modelling study that thick surface padding and minimising head to impact surface frictional constraint can reduce risk of cervical spine injury.…”

Effect of displacement rate on the tensile mechanics of pediatric cervical functional spinal units

“…Thus, each loading rate group investigated (5, 5, 50, 500, and 5000 mm/s) contained two Oc-C2, C3-C4, C5-C6, and C7-T1 functional spinal units randomly distributed from the ten specimens for a total of eight test samples. This examination of loading rate, spanning four orders of magnitude, covers the range of loading rates that might be expected from static activities to highly dynamic interactions (Alem et al, 1984;Yoganandan et al, 1989Yoganandan et al, , 1990Yoganandan et al, , 1991Pintar et al, 1998). Since each specimen was randomly assigned a loading rate, inter-specimen variability should be minimized and the effect of loading rate alone should be distinguishable.…”

Neck Injury Biomechanics

“…Yoganandan et al were the fi rst to examine the dynamics of isolated whole cervical spines in compressive impact [ 68 ]. They quantifi ed the resulting complex kinematics and suggested that buckling instability may play a role.…”