Ju-Hui Chung 1, Hsiao-Ting Chen 1, Hsiao-Fan Yan 1, Hui-Chi Cheng 2, Kai-Ping Shaw 1,2, Chih-Hsin Pan 1, Bo-Yuan Tseng 1

1 Dept. of Forensic Pathology, Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ministry of Justice, Taiwan
2 Dept. of Pathology, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract 
Traffic accident is one of the most common patterns of accidental death in Taiwan, and patterned injuries have distinct pattern that plays a crucial role in traffic-related death investigation. There is a growing concern about driving under illness or medically related condition and urgent attention to elucidate the cause of the accident depend on patterned injuries. In addition to the legislation of driving under influence (DUI) of drug or medication, it still lacks of objective quantitative criteria. In order to clarify the driving impact factors of traffic accidents, guarantee the judicial rights, strengthen quantitative research on forensic evidences, the goal of this study is to conduct an epidemiological analysis of traffic-related deaths and to determine the impact factors of DUI such as alcohol, illicit drugs, prescription drugs, and illness.
A 10-year retrospective study was constructed by collecting a total of 2485 (12.6%) traffic accident’s forensic fatalities out of 19786 forensic autopsy fatalities from Institute of Forensic Medicine, Ministry of Justice in Taiwan (2007-2016). All traffic-related fatality information was collected and analyzed according to epidemiological investigation. These results demonstrated the manners of death of total 2,485 traffic fatalities were 2320 (93.4%) accidental causes, 83 (3.3%) natural causes, 43 (1.7%) uncertain causes, 20 (0.8%) homicides and 19 (0.8%) suicides. The average age was 52.8 ± 14.6 years old. The age distribution of traffic-related fatalities was skewed towards the aged groups above 60 years old range with the highest occurrences (49.5%) in 2016. The subgroup of the deceased with chronic diseases accounts for 20.1% increasing to 28.5% of total annual traffic-related fatalities from 2013 to 2016. Epidemiological study indicates that 15.4% and 4.3% of all the 280 traffic-related deaths in 2016 are correlated to alcohol and drug respectively. The annual trend within the last decade also shows a declining trend of drunk driving and an increasing trend of driving under illness. The study demonstrated that despite the steady decline of drunk driving, DUI of drug and illness still represent the major causes of traffic accidents. The result can be referenced for the establishment of traffic accident prevention strategies.

This work was supported by Ministry of Justice, project no. 107-1301-05-17-01.

Keywords: Traffic accident, Substance Abuse, Driving under illness, Driving under influence (DUI), Patterned Injury