Abstract
Body armour is a type of protective equipment worn by military personnel that aims to prevent or reduce injury from ballistic projectiles (secondary blast effects) to structures within the thorax and abdomen [1]. Such injuries remain the leading cause of potentially survivable deaths on the modern battlefield [2, 3]. Arresting bleeding from projectiles penetrating the thoracic cavity is difficult as it is not amenable to compression by applying direct pressure [2]. Although modern haemostatic dressings and the early use of blood products can potentially delay time to death or significant complications [4] the only way of definitively stopping ongoing intra-thoracic bleeding is surgery [5]. However; not every soldier sustaining a chest wound dies from it, demonstrating the variable vulnerability of the structures within the thorax and abdomen. In addition there is also an increasing recognition that prevention of those injuries causing significant long term morbidity is also required, as demonstrated by the recent addition of pelvic and eye protection [6, 7].
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Breeze, J., Lewis, E.A., Fryer, R. (2016). Optimising the Anatomical Coverage Provided by Military Body Armour Systems. In: Bull, A., Clasper, J., Mahoney, P. (eds) Blast Injury Science and Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21867-0_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21867-0_28
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