Cervical spine tensile stiffness-to-failure and load-to-failure increased nonlinearly, whereas normalized displacement at failure decreased nonlinearly, from birth to adulthood. Pronounced ligamentous laxity observed at younger ages in the O-C2 segment quantitatively supports the prevalence of spinal cord injury without radiographic abnormality in the pediatric population. This study provides important and previously unavailable data for validating pediatric cervical spine models, for evaluating current scaling techniques and animal surrogate models, and for the development of more biofidelic pediatric crash test dummies.
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