You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Commentary
Accounting for vehicle, crash, and occupant characteristics in traffic crash studies
  1. Peter Cummings1,2,
  2. Barbara McKnight3
  1. 1Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
  2. 2Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
  3. 3Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Peter Cummings, 250 Grandview Drive, Bishop, CA 93514, USA; peterc{at}uw.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/ip.2009.025163

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    In 2006, Elliott et al1 reported that children age 2–6 years in a crash had a lower risk of death when using a child restraint (car seat or seat belt with booster seat), compared with a seat belt only: risk ratio (RR) 0.79, and 0.72 if restraint misuse was excluded. In 2009, Rice et al2 3 reported that child restraints, compared with seat belts, did little to reduce mortality for children age 2–8 years: RR 0.52 for a child younger than 1 year, 0.51 for age 1, 0.93 for age 2, 1.05 for age 3, 0.89 for 4–5 years, and 1.15 for 6–8 years.

    In a letter, Elliott et al4 argued that because Rice et al2 included adults in their study, their estimates might be biased. In response, Rice and Anderson5 estimated that for children age 3 years and younger the RR for death in a safety seat, compared with a seat belt, was 0.85 if the analysis included adults and 0.94 if adults were excluded. In their articles in this issue of Injury Prevention, Elliott (see page 367),372),7 expand on this question: will a study of child restraints be biased if adults are included?

    Some methods to reduce confounding bias

    To estimate whether restraint use influences the risk of death, we can compare the proportions of restrained and unrestrained children who died in crashes. However, this may be a biased estimate of restraint effects if those restrained and unrestrained differ in regard to other factors related to death. Factors that might produce this bias include vehicle features (model, weight), crash attributes (force due to deceleration, distance to a trauma center), and occupant characteristics (age, seat position). This type of bias is called confounding. Methods to reduce confounding include …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Linked articles 24844.

    • Funding This work was supported by grant R49/CE000197 from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    • Competing interests None.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles