Texas car accident victims: Your airbag may have saved your kidneys

The airbag in your car may protect your… kidneys?  That’s right, we said kidneys.  A new study in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons shows that in a car crash, your vehicle’s airbag may in fact be your kidneys’ best friend.

 

This study is important because it is the first one to ever examine the role that airbags play in protecting the kidneys.  Airbags are usually thought of as a way to protect accident victims’ heads and spines – not their other various internal organs.  Researchers were very encouraged by these findings, and believe further study on the effectiveness of airbags in protecting internal organs is warranted.

 

The researchers did this study by examining 2,864 records from the U.S. Crash Injury Research and Engineering database.  Records ranged from accidents that happened in 1996 to September 2008.  139 accident victims suffered from kidney injuries in this sample of data.  Just over half of the victims injured their kidneys in a front impact collision, while just under half injured them in a side-impact collision.

 

If a vehicle occupant was protected by a front-impact airbag, their risk of kidney injury was reduced by 45.3 percent compared to those without front-impact airbags.  If the victim was protected with a side-impact airbag, they experienced a 52.8 percent reduced risk.  Interestingly, side-impact airbags are less common as they are newer, so not as many accident victims benefited from their use.

 

This research matters because half to two-thirds of all blunt force trauma injuries to the kidneys are caused by car wrecks.