Washington, Feb 18 (Inditop.com) Alcohol plays the villain in the rising toll of fatal car crashes involving young women drivers in the US, says a new research.
In 2007 alone, alcohol-related fatal car crashes accounted for almost a third of the total in the US.
The research team analysed data from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on fatal road traffic collisions for the years 1995-2007.
They looked at the proportion of drivers whose blood samples had contained alcohol across five age bands: 16; 17; 18; 19 to 20; and 21 to 24 years.
In all, there were just short of 180,000 fatal car crashes among drivers aged 16 to 24 during the study period.
Rates among young men fell year on year by 2.5 crashes per 100,000 of the population. They fell in all four age groups up to the age of 20 and remained the same for those aged 21 to 24 between 1995 to 2007.
The rates among young women were much lower than those of their male peers in each of the years studied, but they did not follow the same patterns, according to information provided by the British Medical Journal.
Among 16-year-old women drivers, the rate fell by 0.8 per 100,000 of the population and remained the same for 17 and 18 year olds. And it increased by 0.7 per 100,000 of the population among 19 year olds and by 0.6 per 100,000 for those aged 21 to 24.
The increase in the proportion of young female drivers with a positive blood alcohol test involved in a fatal collision was also greater (3.1 percent) than it was for young male drivers (1.2 percent).
These findings were published in Injury Prevention.
