In the United States over 1.7 million cases of traumatic brain injury are reported yearly, but predictive correlation of cellular injury to impact tissue strain is still lacking, particularly for neuronal injury resulting from compression. Given the prevalence of compressive deformations in most blunt head trauma, this information is critically important for the development of future mitigation...

Injuries to the spinal column are common and road traffic accidents are the commonest cause. Subaxial cervical spine (C3-C7) trauma encompasses a wide spectrum of osseous and ligamentous injuries, in addition to being frequently associated with neurological injury. Multidetector computed tomography (MDCT) is routinely performed to evaluate acute cervical spine trauma, very often as first-line i...

In this study, we studied the relationship between fracture patterns and motor function recovery in 70 consecutive patients with cervical spinal cord injury. Fractures were categorized into 6 fracture types and subdivided into stages according to the Allen-Ferguson classification system:compressive flexion (CF), distractive flexion (DF), compressive extension (CE), distractive extension (DE), v...

Mechanical trauma has been shown to cause chondrocyte death. The response of the surviving cells has not been fully characterized especially with regards to aging. This study investigates the response to injury in aging chondrocytes. Human articular chondrocytes from younger and older donor knees were cultured in agarose gel disks for three weeks. Disks were submitted to a brief 30% compressive...

Injuries to the head and neck are the most frequent catastrophic sports injury, and head injuries are the most common direct athletic cause of death. Although direct compressive forces may injure the brain, neural tissue is particularly susceptible to injury from shearing stresses, which are most likely to occur when rotational forces are applied to the head. The most common athletic head injur...

Cervical halter traction has been a method of gentle traction used in home care settings for selected patients with cervical radiculopathy. An active management program with cervical halter traction was initiated for patients with cervical spine injury admitted to Choma General Hospital in Zambia during the years 2000–2009. The surgical consultant on call was available to assist with early radi...

In this study, a framework for understanding the propagation of stress waves in brain tissue under blast loading has been developed. It was shown that tissue nonlinearity and rate dependence are the key parameters in predicting the mechanical behavior under such loadings, as they determine whether traveling waves could become steeper and eventually evolve into shock discontinuities. To investig...

The complications of total hip arthroplasty (THA) during the immediate postoperative period consist mainly in dislocation of the prosthesis, haematomas under antocoagulants, early infections, dismantling of osteotomy, neurological injury, heterotopic ossification and delayed restoration of the range of motion of the hip joint. We present here an infrequently described case of haematoma of the p...

The thoracolumbar junction comprises the spinal cord, nerve roots and the cauda equina, exhibiting unique anatomical features that may give rise to a diverse array of symptoms under conditions of injury, thus complicating the diagnosis of compressive disorders. The present study aimed to examine varying degrees and forms of compression at this level of the spinal cord using a two-dimensional mo...