MONDAY, April 14, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Contrary to popular folklore, people who've been drinking don't escape injury in auto accidents.
In a new study, University of Michigan researchers found people who have alcohol in their system -- even when it's far less than the legal limit for impaired driving -- are more likely to be severely injured in car crashes.
"What we found is that when you drink and drive, you not only increase your chances of getting into a crash, but you're also increasing your chance of having a severe injury in a crash," says study author Dr. Ronald Maio, director of the University of Michigan Injury Research Center.
Moreover, even a passenger who's been drinking is at risk, according to the study.
"While having a designated driver is recommended, it doesn't protect you if you get into a crash and you have alcohol on board," Maio says. "If you get into a crash, having alcohol in your system increased injury severity by 30 percent."
Results of the study appear in the April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Maio says the researchers aren't sure why just having alcohol in your system makes you more vulnerable in auto accidents, but he suspects that changes might be occurring in the body on the cellular level, and those changes might affect the body's tolerance to kinetic energy caused by a crash.
Maio and his colleagues gathered data on 1,362 adult crash victims from two Michigan hospitals. The crash victims were almost equally male and female and were mostly white. The average age was between 32 and 36 years old.
Almost 80 percent of the victims were driving one of the vehicles involved in the accident. Twenty-one percent of the people injured had been drinking alcohol before the crash.
The researchers obtained detailed information on most of the crashes, including seat belt use, age of the driver, sex and the severity of the crash.
Drinking alcohol before a crash more than doubled the risk of dying in an accident, according to the study. The risk of almost every type of injury went up with the consumption of alcohol.
Less than 27 percent of those who hadn't been drinking had to be admitted to the hospital, while more than 60 percent of those who had alcohol were admitted due to their injuries.
"We may be underestimating the burden of alcohol in auto injuries," Maio says.
Every year, more than 17,000 people die from alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The cost of alcohol-related auto accidents in the U.S. is $51 billion a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Maio says these results may hold true for other types of injuries also, such as falls or sports injuries. And, he says, when treating victims of auto accidents, physicians should take alcohol consumption into account.
"We understand that alcohol is a significant factor in all we do in the emergency room," says Dr. William Goldberg, an emergency medicine physician at New York University Medical Center. He says other studies have shown that if you're drinking, it blunts your ability to feel pain, which may change the way you're treated in an emergency room.
But, he says, anecdotally, it seems that people who've been drinking often do better than people who haven't.
More information
To learn more about alcohol's effect on transportation safety, visit the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The National Safety Council offers these tips on driving defensively.
