Experimental Observations of Animal Neck Injuries under Whiplash Simulations

Up to now, the mechanism of neck whiplash injuries is not completely understood. One of the reasons is that it is difficult to establish an animal model subjected to whiplash-type injuries (especially for the animal model of cervical spinal cord injury). For this reason, a new experimental setup was designed to simulate the whiplash extension exposure in the neck of dogs. Based on the related detections (i. e., the behavior assessment, light microscopy, neuropotential measurement, gross observation and MRI auxiliary examination), a consistent finding was obtained as follows: the behavior function and nerve conduction function of neck spinal cord were impaired and the impairment extent was positively associated with the peak value of head posterior traction acceleration; namely, the greater the posterior acceleration peak was, the severer the related function impairment of neck spinal cord would be.