Date published: 2006/03/05
The BBC says:
Male drivers who are involved in a car crash are more likely to die if they are obese, a US study suggests.
The Milwaukee team says this may be due to the driver's greater momentum in a crash and because of the effect obesity has on the body's ability to recover.
But the bodies of moderately overweight men appear to cushion the blow, reports the American Journal of Public Health.
The authors said their findings, based on crash data involving 22,000 people, had implications for vehicle design.
...
But there was no significant link between BMI and women drivers' risk of death, the researchers found.
...
A spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said the research was interesting."However, it would be a very costly process to have a car modelled on the person's shape to make it as safe as possible - that's really a bespoke car and would take a lot of money and effort to produce," he said.
"It would be preferable to try to stop people having car accidents in the first place."
Exactly. More rather pointless research.
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