BACKGROUND Navajo motor vehicle mortality is the highest among the 12 Indian Health Service (IHS) administrative areas. In July 1988, the Navajo Nation enacted a primary enforcement safety belt use and a child restraint law. OBJECTIVE Assess the impact of the laws on the rate and severity of pediatric (0-19 years) motor vehicle injury resulting in hospitalizations in the Navajo Nation. METH...

BACKGROUND Health impact assessment (HIA) studies are increasingly predicting the health effects of mode shifts in traffic. The challenge for such studies is to combine the health effects, caused by injuries, with the disease driven health effects, and to express the change in the health with a common health indicator. Disability-adjusted life year (DALY) combines years lived disabled or injure...

OBJECTIVE To determine the performance of the ICD/AIS MAP (EJ MacKenzie et al) as a method of classifying injury severity for children. METHODS Data on all children less than 16 years of age admitted to all designated trauma centers in Pennsylvania from January 1994 through October 1996 were obtained from the state trauma registry. The ICD/AIS MAP was used to convert all injury related ICD-9-...

BACKGROUND Although extensive research for the optimal treatment of clavicle fractures has been performed, comparative studies between monotrauma and polytrauma patients are lacking. OBJECTIVE To compare fracture distribution and treatment in monotrauma and polytrauma patients with a clavicle fracture. METHODS Single center retrospective cohort study. Fractures were classified by the Robins...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether varying the seat belt load limiter (SBL) according to crash and occupant characteristics could have real-world injury reduction benefits in frontal impacts and, if so, to quantify those benefits. METHODS Real-world UK accident data were used to identify the target population of vehicle occupants and frontal crash scenarios where improved chest protection could b...

INTRODUCTION The Injury Severity Score (ISS) and the New Injury Severity Score (NISS) are widely used for anatomic severity assessments after trauma. We present here the Tangent Injury Severity Score (TISS), which transforms the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) as a predictor of mortality. MATERIAL AND METHODS The TISS is defined as the sum of the tangent function of AIS/6 to the power 3.04 mul...

Background Although firefighting and emergency medical services are high-risk professions, few studies have identified the aetiology of injury in the fire service beyond the fireground. Methods Data were collected for work-related injuries in a medium-sized metropolitan fire department. In a descriptive study, the factors explored included the nature of injury, agent, mechanism, body location,...

There are a very limited number of reports concerning the relationship between pedestrian head injuries and collision parameters through a combination of statistical analysis methods and finite element method (FEM). This study aims to explore the characteristics of pedestrian head injuries in car-pedestrian collisions at different parameters by using the two means above. A retrospective analysi...

BACKGROUND Injury severity measures are based either on the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) or the International Classification of diseases (ICD). The latter is more convenient because routinely collected by clinicians for administrative reasons. To exploit this advantage, a proprietary program that maps ICD-9-CM into AIS codes has been used for many years. Recently, a program called ICDPIC trau...