Adolescent injury risk behavior

Abstract

Health-risk behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of morbidity and mortality among adolescents and young adults are often established during adolescence and extended into adulthood. Unintentional motor vehicle injury is the leading cause of mortality in childhood and adolescence in developed countries. This review presents some of the risk factors found in research on unintentional injury and death in adolescence, including risk factors for siblings and adolescents with intellectual disability. These findings should be connected with the findings of a recent study that showed that about one third of all unintentional childhood injury deaths in the United States were preventable. For injury prevention to take place and being effective a multidisciplinary approach is needed to identify host, agent and environmental factors using epidemiology research and biomechanics. In the population of adolescents with intellectual disability there has been little research on injury epidemiology or injury prevention and the service provider will need to focus and educate staff on this issue in order to prevent injury that can result in further disability.