The Lack of Sex, Age, and Anthropometric Diversity in Neck Biomechanical Data

Abstract

Female, elderly, and obese individuals are at greater risk than male, young, and non-obese individuals for neck injury in otherwise equivalent automotive collisions. The development of effective safety technologies to protect all occupants requires high quality data from a range of biomechanical test subjects representative of the population at risk. Here we sought to quantify the demographic characteristics of the volunteers and post-mortem human subjects (PMHSs) used to create the available biomechanical data for the human neck during automotive impacts. A systematic literature and database search was conducted to identify kinematic data that could be used to characterize the neck response to inertial loading or direct head/body impacts. We compiled the sex, age, height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) for 999 volunteers and 110 PMHSs exposed to 5,431 impacts extracted from 63 published studies and three databases, and then compared the distributions of these parameters to reference data drawn from the neck-injured, fatally-injured, and general populations. We found that the neck biomechanical data were biased toward males, the volunteer data were younger, and the PMHS data were older than the reference populations. Other smaller biases were also noted, particularly within female distributions, in the height, weight, and BMI distributions relative to the neck-injured populations. It is vital to increase the diversity of volunteer and cadaveric test subjects in future studies in order to fill the gaps in the current neck biomechanical data. This increased diversity will provide critical data to address existing inequities in automotive and other safety technologies.

Thoughts and perspectives on biomechanical numerical models under impacts: Are women forgotten from research?

“…Science has therefore to investigate these differences and specificities and provide dedicated treatments, precautions, or methods, separately if needed. However, if general questions are raised, independently of the sex, and if the specific focus and efforts are concentrated on the general studies of the ''human body'' without any consideration of sex (as in the framework of impact biomechanics with examples provided in the present paper), it is very relevant to raise the question about the utilization of female subjects or female-based specific data in this area of science, in order to avoid bias analysis and bias data 153 and inappropriate treatments or protecting device development. As illustrated in Figure 6, non-sex-based studies which do not focus specifically on male or female and which raised general question on the human body, should have equivalent cohorts.…”

Heading biomechanics in female football: A systematic scoping review

“…Despite the high incidence of heading injuries and concussive and sub-concussive outcomes 8 , heading in female has been poorly studied from a biomechanical point of view 8 . A review study found that biomechanical data of the neck were biased toward males, and female's distributions in body segments sizes were biased in terms of height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) 9 , in uencing the inertial characteristics. Speci cally, female head is on the mean smaller, with the center of mass located in a lower position in comparison to men 10 .…”