A person’s body is less sprightly as it gets older. With this in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise that older motorcycle riders might sustain larger injuries when getting into an accident. Common sense might say one thing, but that’s not the same as determining the ratio of injuries for real. All older riders and Sons of Anarchy fans, listen up.
A group at Brown put together the study, which was published in the journal Injury Prevention on Wednesday. The researchers took a look at over 1.5 million motorcycle accidents and their data via the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-All Injury Program to determine how the number of collisions related to hospitalization rates in different age brackets. Three brackets were studied: young people, or people between 20 and 39, middle-aged people, or those between 40-59, and the older bracket, filled with people aged 60 or older.
As noted prior, the oldest age bracket ended up in the hospital quite a bit more often than its counterparts. In fact, researchers determined that the oldest bracket was 2.5 times more likely to end up getting hurt than the riders in the young age bracket. The researchers also found that the older riders were simply more susceptible to injuries than the younger bracket, which would explain the added hospitalization. The L.A. Times has noted younger riders are more privy to cuts, bruises, and arms breaks, whereas older riders often run into internal injuries and of these the most common are actually brain injuries. Additionally, older riders often suffer bigger bone breaks, including to the neck or upper trunk.
In either event, it’s probably a good thing that Clay Morrow will be away from his bike for a while on Sons of Anarchy. As a man in that third age bracket, if he were to go down in a motorcycle accident, it wouldn’t be pretty.
