Obese drivers are less likely to wear seatbelts than their normal weight counterparts, warn researchers of the University at Buffalo in New York.
“We found that the relationship between the amount of obesity and seatbelt use was linear; the more obese the driver, the less likely that seatbelts were used,” said lead author Dr Dietrich Jehle.
A 2010 study conducted by Jehle’s team linked obesity and higher death risk in traffic accidents. The research which looked at more than 155,000 drivers involved in severe car crashes revealed that obese individuals were 56 percent more likely to die in a crash than normal weight peers.
A review of the data, however, revealed that normal weight drivers were 67 percent more likely to wear a seatbelt than morbidly obese drivers.
“It’s clear that not wearing a seatbelt is associated with a higher chance of death,” said Jehle who presented his study at the annual meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Chicago.
“We hypothesized that obese drivers were less likely to wear seatbelts than their normal weight counterparts.
Obese drivers may find it more difficult to buckle up a standard seatbelt.”
Although cars are much safer now and traffic deaths in the US have been declining for many years, one-third of the US population is obese and something needs to be done to increase their use of seatbelts, Jehle said.
“We need to do something, since one-thirds of the US population is overweight (not obese) and one-thirds is considered obese,” he suggested.
