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 Doctors have long advised parents to put infants and toddlers in the
back seat of vehicles in rear-facing carseats as long as possible,
at least until they’re around two years old or too large or heavy to
fit in that position. While experts generally agree this is the
safest position for these tiny passengers, research to date has
focused much more on the effectiveness of rear-facing carseats for
head-on or side-impact collisions and offered a less clear picture
of how children fare in rear-impact crashes.
Rear-impact collisions are rare and less deadly to children than
other types of crashes, researchers note in SAE International. But
one lingering concern about rear-facing carseats in rear-impact
collisions is that babies’ heads might smack into the back side of
the front seats in the vehicle, causing head or neck injuries.
For the current study, researchers performed a series of crash tests
of rear-impact collisions in a lab using four carseats commonly used
in the U.S. - the Evenflo Embrace and the Maxi Cosi Mico AP/Mico Max
30, infant seats used only in the rear-facing position, and the
Diono Radian and Safety 1st convertible carseats.
"We found that the rear-facing carseats protected the crash test
dummy well when exposed to a typical rear impact," said lead study
author Julie Mansfield, an engineer at the Injury Biomechanics
Research Center affiliated with Ohio State University’s Wexner
Medical Center in Columbus.
The car seats supported the child-size dummy throughout the crash
and did their job to keep the head, neck, and spine aligned,
Mansfield said by email. And, a lot of the crash energy was absorbed
through the car seat interacting with the vehicle seat, so that
reduced the amount of energy transferred into the occupant, which is
important for preventing injuries.
"We already know that rear-facing car seats have very low injury
rates when we look at real cases in crash databases," Mansfield
added. "This study just helped us understand exactly how they are
working in a rear-impact crash."
In a frontal crash, occupants are pulled toward the front of the
vehicle. For a rear-facing child in this scenario, a child is
cradled into car seat and the forces are distributed evenly
throughout the child’s back.
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"With a rear impact, we would expect occupants to be "pulled" toward
the rear of the vehicle according to basic physics," Mansfield said.
"When a child is in a rear-facing carseat in this scenario, the car
seat actually stays with the child and continues to support the head
and spine."
Sometimes the car seat rotates upward, but still keeps the child
safely inside the shell, Mansfield added. The bottom portion of the
car seat also interacts with the vehicle seat in which it is
installed, and a lot of the crash forces are absorbed through this
interaction with the soft vehicle seat.
"That means less crash forces are transferred to the occupant, which
is critical for reducing the risk of injury," Mansfield said.
One limitation of the study is that researchers also only tested
crash scenarios with one type of vehicle, and results might be
different with other types of cars or with different carseats than
the ones used in the crash tests.
Still, the results should reassure parents that rear-facing carseats
can protect kids even in rear-impact collisions, said Kristy
Arbogast, co-scientific director of the Center for Injury Research
and Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
"These results provide confirmation that even in rear impact
crashes, rear facing child restraints provide excellent protection,"
Abrogast, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
"Current recommendations are that children should remain rear facing
until two years of age or the maximum height or weight specified by
the child restraint manufacturer," Abrogast added. "These data do
not provide any reason to change that recommendation."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2H6L12q SAE International, online April 3,
2018.
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