A fall from an electric scooter (e-scooter) can look deceptively minor. The rider is standing only a short distance above the road and, unlike a motorcycle, most e-scooters are limited to relatively modest speeds.

Yet trauma surgeons are seeing injuries that tell a different story. E-scooter crashes can cause serious head injuries, damage to internal organs, and complex fractures – sometimes after what appears to have been a simple fall.

This matters as e-scooters become an increasingly common form of transport in cities around the world. New research from England and Wales offers one of the clearest pictures yet of the injuries involved.

The study examined more than 15,000 people with moderate or severe injuries recorded in a national trauma database. This included 580 e-scooter riders, more than 7,000 motorcyclists, and more than 7,000 cyclists.

The clearest difference was what happened to riders’ heads.

Among seriously injured adults, traumatic brain injuries were around three and a half times as common among e-scooter riders as among motorcyclists, and around 1.7 times more common than in cyclists. More than a third of the injuries recorded among adult e-scooter riders involved traumatic brain injury.

Damage to internal organs and blood vessels was also proportionally more common.........

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