Katharina Buczek
Car accidents undoubtedly pose the risk of serious and potentially fatal injuries to all involved, but recent research suggests that women may face additional dangers.
A team from the Medical College of Wisconsin analyzed patterns of trauma injury and discovered notable gender disparities in the types of injuries sustained in car accidents. In particular, they found that women are more likely to experience shock after a collision.
The findings of this study could lead to a reconsideration of safety standards to ensure they account for the physiological differences between men and women.
For the study, the researchers scrutinized data from the National Trauma Data Bank, concentrating on individuals aged 16 and above who had sustained abdominal and pelvic injuries in car accidents from 2018 to 2021.
The findings indicated that women are at a higher risk of suffering serious injuries in these specific areas than men, even in situations of lesser severity.
It was observed that women could go into shock– a dangerous state in which the body’s organs begin to shut down due to inadequate blood flow– with injuries that are less severe than those that might cause similar conditions in men.
Using the shock index, a tool doctors employ to swiftly evaluate a patient’s condition through heart rate and blood pressure, it was found that women generally had higher values for this index across various injury types.
This points to the possibility that women might react differently to physical trauma, or they could be more susceptible to certain types of injuries because of the way safety devices interact with their physiology.
“These novel findings of [gender] differences in shock index could mean we need to look further into how and why this is happening,” said Dr. Susan Cronn, the study’s first author.
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