On Friday, the hospitals of Paris (AP-HP) drew up a clear observation: according to the results of a recent study, accidents with electric scooters can lead to injuries as severe as those involving motorcycles or bicycles.
The anesthesia-resuscitation departments making up the Traumabase research group, the Pitié-Salpêtrière AP-HP hospital, the Sorbonne University and Inserm, have studied and analyzed the severity of injuries resulting from road accidents with so-called motorized personal transport devices (EDPM), including in particular scooters (but also electric monowheels, Segways, etc.). Their results were published on June 30 in the journal JAMA Network Open.
A vertiginous increase in the number of accidents in four years
All patients admitted to one of the 26 trauma centers participating in the study following a road accident involving an EDPM, a bicycle or a motorcycle between January 1, 2019 and December 20, 2022 were included, representing 5,233 patients with a median age of 33 years.
The study shows that the number of patients treated after a road accident involving the use of an EDPM was multiplied by 2.8 in four years, or 229 patients seriously injured over this period. EDPM drivers had severe trauma in 45.5% of cases compared to 39.7% for motorcycle drivers and 47.3% for cyclists.
They were twice as likely to have head injuries, more serious than those of motorcyclists, probably because only less than 25% were wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, underlines the study.
Number of accidents in a context of alcoholism
Another lesson is that serious accidents involving EDPMs occurred more often in the evenings and weekends in a context of alcohol intake above the legal threshold in a third of cases.
These patients required surgery during the first 24 hours following the accident in two thirds of the cases: mainly repair surgery for limb fractures but also neurosurgery.
Three quarters of these patients were hospitalized in intensive care. Hospitalization was often long (15 days on average) and 9% of seriously injured EDPM users died, mainly due to serious head trauma.
Thus, EDPMs are means of transport that can be associated with particularly severe trauma, in the same way as motorcycles or bicycles, concludes the study, considering that during their medical treatment, their users must be considered. as severely traumatized potentials.