A Nationwide Population-Based Study on the Association between Land Transport Accident and Peripheral Vestibular Disorders

Abstract

This case-control study aimed to investigate the association of peripheral vestibular disorders (PVD) with subsequent land transport accidents. Data for this study were obtained from Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) dataset. We retrieved 8704 subjects who were newly found to have land transport accidents as cases. Their diagnosis date was used as their index date. Controls were identified by propensity score matching (one per case, n = 8704 controls) from the NHI dataset with their index date being the date of their first health service claim in 2017. Multiple logistic regressions were performed to calculate the prior PVD odds ratio of cases vs. controls. We found that 2.36% of the sampled patients had been diagnosed with PVD before the index date, 3.37% among cases and 1.36% among controls. Chi-square test revealed that there was a significant association between land transport accident and PVD (p < 0.001). Furthermore, multiple logistic regression analysis suggested that cases were more likely to have had a prior PVD diagnosis when compared to controls (OR = 2.533; 95% CI = 2.041-3.143; p < 0.001). After adjusting for age, gender, hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and hyperlipidemia, cases had a greater tendency to have a prior diagnosis of PVD than controls (OR = 3.001, 95% CI = 2.410-3.741, p < 0.001). We conclude that patients with PVD are at twofold higher odds for land transport accidents.

Keywords: epidemiology; land transport accidents; peripheral vestibular disorders.