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ROADWAY CHARACTERISTICS AND PEDIATRIC PEDESTRIAN INJURY

Wednesday, 30th of November 2011 Print

‘[T]he built environment is directly related to the risk of pedestrian injury.’

       ROADWAY CHARACTERISTICS AND PEDIATRIC PEDESTRIAN INJURY

Abstract below; full text available to subscribers of Epidemiologic Reviews

Also at http://epirev.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/11/14/epirev.mxr021.abstract?etoc

Roadway Characteristics and Pediatric Pedestrian Injury

  1. 1.   Charles DiMaggio* and Guohua Li

Correspondence to Dr. Charles DiMaggio, Department of Anesthesiology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, 622 West 168 Street, Room PH5-531, New York

Abstract

Changing the built environment is a sound, but often underutilized approach to injury control. The authors reviewed the literature and conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize the evidence on the association of roadway characteristics with risk of pediatric pedestrian injury. To synthesize the data, they converted results to odds ratios based on direct results or abstracted outcomes and used Bayesian meta-analytic approaches by modeling outcomes as the logit of a normally distributed set of outcomes with vague prior distributions for the central measure of effect and its variance. On the basis of 10 studies of roadway features restricted exclusively to pediatric populations, the synthesized effect estimate for the association of roadway characteristics with pedestrian injury risk was 2.5 (95% credible interval: 1.8, 3.2). The probability of a new study showing an association between the built roadway and pediatric pedestrian injury was nearly 100%. The authors concluded that the built environment is directly related to the risk of pedestrian injury. This review and meta-analysis suggests that even modest interventions to the built roadway environment may result in meaningful reductions in the risk of pediatric pedestrian injury.

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