Does placenta position modify the risk of placental abruption in car crashes?

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Jérôme Delotte1, Michel Behr, Lionel Thollon

  • 1Laboratoire de Biomécanique Appliquée, INRETS/Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France. jerome.delotte@inrets.fr

Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering
|August 14, 2009
PubMed

The goal of this paper is to study the influence of placenta position on the risk of placenta abruption following a car crash involving a full term pregnant woman in the driver's seat. We developed an anatomically precise finite element numerical model of a pregnant woman. This numerical model was validated using experimental data from crash tests using cadavers given to science. For a frontal impact at a speed of 20 km/h, the mean value of peak strain levels at the utero-placenta interface were found to be close to 20%, independent of placenta position, representing an adverse foetal outcome risk of approximately 15%. This study found no significant effect of placenta position on the risk of placenta abruption. Our anatomically precise approach does however confirm the interest of using a numerical model when studying injury mechanisms in pregnant women involved in car crashes.

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