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Each year, over half of the world's 1.17 million fatalities resulting from traffic collisions are pedestrians (World Bank, 2008). Mitigation of such fatalities and serious injuries requires a thorough understanding of the common injury mechanisms that occur in pedestrian impacts. Studying the frequency of injury to each body region and how injury patterns are related may provide additional insight into pedestrian injury mechanisms, which could be used to develop additional prevention strategies. There is a wealth of information regarding pedestrian collisions within national databases that have not been extensively used to investigate these issues to date. This paper presents a review of selected databases that contain information regarding injuries to pedestrians who have been involved in a motor vehicle collision, including the strengths and weaknesses of each in performing this type of analysis.

Over half of the 1.2 million annual traffic fatalities worldwide are pedestrians struck by motor vehicles [ 1 ]. Medical databases, such as the National Inpatient Sample (NIS), have been utilized to ascertain injury patterns in the general population of injured pedestrians [ 2 - 3 ]. However, the authors are not aware of any studies investigating how factors, such as physical impairments, intoxication, and pre-existing medical implants (e.g. hip replacement, artificial knee, etc.) affect the prevalence of pedestrian accidents or injury outcomes. Five to eight million inpatient hospitalization records are included in the NIS annually, and this large sample size allows for analyses that are not possible with smaller data sets on pedestrian injuries. The current study utilizes the NIS to evaluate how several factors such as blindness, deafness, intoxication, and pre-existing medical implants affect injury patterns when compared to the general population of hospitalized pedestrians.