Permanent Medical Impairment Among Road-Traffic Victims and Risk of Serious Consequences

Injury rating is still a very important issue in road traffic accident research. The judgement of the immediate consequences of a trauma has been studied and developed and today the AIS is used worldwide. Today the interest of consequences is also focused on the long-term consequences in terms of impairment, disability and handicap due to trauma. The AIS and ISS cannot describe these risks too well. On the other hand the same basic concept and materials can perhaps be used also for long-term consequences. This paper presents a continuation of a method to use the ATS to body regions for judgement of impairment and focuses on the age factor as an explanation to risk differences in long-term consequences. The age factor has proved to be important and it is proposed that the impairment risk should be used as a tool for the work of better traffic safety.