A longitudinal study of lifestyle factors as predictors of injuries and crashes among young adults

This study was part of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. This is a longitudinal study of the health, development and behavio ur of a cohort of 1037 young people born in Dunedin, New Zealand between 1 April 1972 and 31 March 1973. Explanatory measures covering background, beh avioural and personality factors were obtained at ages 15 and 18 and were u sed as potential predictors of outcomes reported at age 21. Four outcomes w ere considered: any crash, injury crash, non-injury crash, and serious inju ry (not motor vehicle related). Overall, very few lifestyle factors were im portant predictors of any of these outcomes. Factors that were shown to pre dict injury crashes differed from those that predicted non-injury crashes. Also, those that predicted a traffic crash differed from those that predict ed a serious non-traffic injury. These results suggest that focusing injury prevention efforts on changing the lifestyles of young adults is unlikely to reduce overall crash risk, and would have little impact on the risk of s erious injury. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.