Traffic injury prevention
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Traffic injury prevention · Sep 2007
Multicenter StudyGeneral health status and functional disability following injury in traffic crashes.
With increasing rates of survival associated with traffic crashes, a shift to understand the consequences of injury has risen to prominence. This prospective cohort study set out to examine general health status and functional disability at 2 months and 6-8 months post-crash. ⋯ This study demonstrated significant, ongoing loss of health-related quality of life and impairment associated with injuries sustained in road crashes, highlighting the need for continuing care post-discharge to facilitate a rapid return to optimal health.
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Traffic injury prevention · Sep 2007
Randomized Controlled TrialRoad characteristics and driver fatigue: a simulator study.
Two experiments examined the influence of road characteristics on driver fatigue in a prolonged simulator drive. In experiment one, ten military truck drivers drove a mixed route, with straight, winding, and straight highway segments. In experiment two, 16 additional drivers drove either a straight, a winding, or a mixed route. ⋯ Our results confirm that decremental changes in driving performance varied among road types. In the straight road components, we found decrements in the quality of lane maintaining (experiment one) and steering quality (experiments one and two) and longitudinal speed (experiment two). In the winding road, we found that drivers increased their driving speed over time (experiments one and two).
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Traffic injury prevention · Sep 2007
Road casualties and enforcement: distributional assumptions of serially correlated count data.
Road safety data are often in the form of counts and usually temporally correlated. The objective of this research is to investigate the distributional assumptions of road safety data in the presence of temporal correlation. ⋯ The results suggest that the quasi-Poisson and negative binomial outperform the normal and Poisson models in this application. The findings of this research demonstrate a clear link between the intensification of police enforcement and the reduction of traffic accident casualties. In particular, an increase in the number of breath alcohol controls in Greece after 1998 contributed to a reduction in the number of persons killed and seriously injured from traffic accidents.