Hospitalization for bicycle-related injuries in Taiwan

Background: Cycling has always been a very popular means of transportation and a leisure activity recently. However, bicycle-related injuries should be given recognition as a significant issue because of the annual mortality rate increased and heavy cost due to cycling injuries. The purposes of this study were to describe the bicycle-related injury hospitalization, and to examine the association between health care utilization and patients' characteristics in Taiwan.

Methods: This secondary data analysis was a retrospective cross sectional study. Data came from the 2007 hospitalization claims in National Health Insurance data set. Study samples were identified as those hospitalizations with ICD9-CM external cause of injury codes related to bicycle-related injuries. We hypothesized that the number of hospitalization, the length of stays (LOS), and medical expenditures vary by patients' gender, age, injury type, and collision with vehicles. We took log transformation of LOS and expenditures to adjust for the skewed nature before analyzing multiple linear regression. Results: In terms of diagnoses of injury, fracture ranked the first (47.1%), followed by TBI (33.8%). Regarding the types of traffic accident, most of the hospitalizations (74.6%) were collisions with vehicles involving cars or motorcycles. Patients who aged more than 65 years old, and waived copayment had significantly longer LOS (p<0.05). Conclusions: We found that the hospitalizations distribution of bicycle-related injuries differed from patients' demographic characteristics. This finding can be used to promote bicycle safety on preventing injuries through different stakeholders such as health, or transportation, and local governments.