Record-high gasoline prices, the slowdown in the economy, and increasing environmental sensitivity are leading more people to bike to work or for play. But an adequate infrastructure may not be in place to protect cyclists from serious injury according to surgeons who presented a new study on the issue during a scientific paper session at the 2009 Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons.
The researchers found that the severity of injury and hospital length-of-stay for bicycle injuries at one trauma center has increased significantly over the past 11 years. Despite the wide-spread attention paid to the importance of wearing helmets, helmet use did not change during the time period of the study, and more than 33 percent of 329 bicycle injury victims had a significant head injury. Even more alarming, the number of chest injuries increased by 15 percent and abdominal injuries rose three-fold over the last five years. "We were astounded by that data," said Jeffry Kashuk, MD, FACS, associate professor of surgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and senior attending surgeon at the Rocky Mountain Regional Trauma Center at Denver Health Medical Center, Denver. "We're talking about injured spleens and livers, internal bleeding, rib fractures, and hemothorax [blood in the chest]. Those kinds of injuries are reflected by an increase in injury severity score," he added.