RETRACTED: Sternal fractures are frequent among polytraumatised patients following high deceleration velocities in a severe vehicle crash

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. Please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).Reason: This article duplicates significant parts of a paper that had already appeared in Ann. Thorac. Surg., 82 (2006) 444–450, doi:10.1016/j.athoracsur.2006.03.046. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that the paper is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and we apologize to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.