Abstract
Trauma is an important cause of death and disability in the United States. Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death among people 1–44 years of age. In 2009, over 177,000 people died as the result of unintentional injury and as a result, 2.5 million potential years of life were lost. Historically, injury was thought to be purely accidental due to uncontrollable and unalterable events, essentially random chance. This began to change in the mid-twentieth century as researchers began to study injury in an effort to understand, define, and prevent these events. The first of these steps was the recognition of injury as a biomechanical event due to the interaction of a person (or victim) with an energy source in certain environments (e.g., an automobile). Several small advances ultimately led to the description of injury as a multiphase event, which can be readily studied by application of an injury matrix. As society has become more complex, injury prevention has evolved from simply studying the biomechanical forces of injury to creating prevention strategies through education, enforcement, and engineering.
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Smith, T.G. (2013). Injury Prevention. In: Wessells, H. (eds) Urological Emergencies. Current Clinical Urology. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-423-4_2
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