Teens misjudge risk of injury, death from accidents, feel invincible: study

TORONTO - Most teens consider themselves virtually invincible and seriously misjudge their risk of injury or death from motor vehicle and other accidents, say researchers, who suggest such misguided attitudes could be avoided with injury-prevention programs begun at an early age.

Teenage drivers have the highest rate of injury and death from motor vehicle crashes of any demographic group in Canada, but a study of Toronto high school students found that most adolescents are oblivious to their risk.

"We talk about it all the time, but it's really, really true," said Dr. Najma Ahmed, assistant director of trauma at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and principal author of the study.

"They really do think they're invincible," the trauma surgeon said Thursday. "They really think that because they're young that they could survive anything, that young people don't die in hospitals. It's only old people that die in hospital, even if you're in an accident."

Ahmed said a pervasive attitude among the more than 260 adolescents in the study was that medical intervention would surely save them from death or disability resulting from an accident.

"It's my job, our job to save them. One of the quotes was: 'There would have to be an inquest if a young person died in a hospital."'

The study, published in the August issue of the journal of the American College of Surgeons, involved evaluating the responses of 15-to 17-year-olds before and after attending a one-day injury-prevention program at the hospital.

The comprehensive program - called ThinkFirst Injury Prevention Strategy for Youth, or TIPSY - is presented once a month to groups of high school students. For the study, teens from eight different high schools were enrolled over a nine-month period.

Asked about their sense of risk, most students said they believed having youth on their side would allow them to overcome almost any kind of adversity, from poor driving conditions to the effects of alcohol or drugs while behind the wheel.

"They really believe because of their age and agility that that makes up for lack of experience, that their reflexes are faster and they're stronger physically," explained Ahmed. "And so ... they believe they're better drivers, in fact, than older people who have a lot more experience."

Taking part in TIPSY - which includes viewing patients in the trauma ICU and meeting a teen who has suffered a life-altering injury - quickly disavows them of that notion, she said.

"It shows them first-hand that this, too, could happen to you."

Ahmed said meeting a peer left with a permanent brain injury or paralysis from an accident had the most impact on participants and was most enduring in altering attitude and behaviour.

She hopes the study's findings could be used to help improve injury-prevention programs to make messages about avoiding risky activities stick with teens better and longer.

In fact, Ahmed would like to see such messaging not only embedded in driver-education programs for adolescents, but also integrated into primary and secondary school programs as part of the curriculum.

Wanda Kristensen, a spokeswoman for MADD Canada, said her organization has programs for both high-school and elementary-school kids across Canada, and the findings about adolescents' attitudes in the study come as no surprise.

"With all the work that we've done with teens, this is really reinforcing what they tell us anecdotally," she said. "They do have a feeling that they're invincible - it's always someone else who's the bad driver, not them. And it's really difficult to get them to understand the consequences of bad choices."

"You can't just have a program for the teens. You can't just show it to them once," she agreed. "There has to be consistent messaging."

Ahmed said that as a trauma surgeon she sees the results of accidents - from motor vehicle crashes to boating and trail-bike accidents to cliff-diving mishaps - every day.

"But when you look at it very carefully ... it's usually not bad luck; it's usually someone has made a bad choice. Someone has chosen to drink and drive, chosen not to wear seatbelts or to speed or be out on a lake at midnight when there's no light."

And the results of those risky actions end up devastating families, she said.

"So it's never just one person who loses their life. It's the whole family losing a child, losing a loved one, losing a parent. It is tragic and it shakes the whole family and they never, ever recover."

Kristensen knows that from personal experience.

In 1996, her 16-year-old son was killed when he got in a car driven by a friend who was impaired by alcohol.

"Your life is never the same," she said. "And you can't go back and redo that. You don't have another opportunity. It's very sad and even after so many years, you still miss them."