Abstract
Head injury remains a worldwide problem for public health professionals. Even with the advent of the airbag in automobiles, the incidence of head injury does not appear to be decreasing rapidly. There is also uncertainty about the mechanisms of brain injury. Based on research conducted over the past four decades, the current understanding is that angular acceleration is more damaging than linear acceleration, even though in any head impact, both forms of acceleration are usually present. Recent studies on brain motion confirm that there is a ¡À 5 mm relative displacement of the brain with respect to the skull during angular acceleration and that this displacement is minimal for purely linear motion. The relative displacement does not appear to increase beyond the ¡À 5 mm limit at high levels of angular acceleration (> 10,000 rad/s2 ). It also appears to be independent of the axis of rotation of the head . A validated mathematical model of brain injury was used to confirm this experimental finding. In a separate experiment, it was found that a helmeted head sustained the same degree of angular acceleration as the unhelmeted head for the same impact, but its linear acceleration was decreased significantly. So, if angular acceleration is the cause of brain injury, then how is the brain protected by the helmet? This paper proposes a new hypothesis of brain injury and suggests that the traditional thinking regarding linear and angular acceleration should be abolished in favor of considering response variables instead of input variables. The proposed variables to be studied are strain rate and the product of strain and strain rate.
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King, A.I., Yang, K.H., Zhang, L., Hardy, W. (2003). Biomechanics of Ligaments: From Molecular Biology to Joint Function. In: Hwang, N.H.C., Woo, S.LY. (eds) Frontiers in Biomedical Engineering. Topics in Biomedical Engineering International Book Series. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8967-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8967-3_9
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