Risk behaviors contributing to recent serious unintentional injuries among school-going adolescent boys in Kolkata: Application of zero-inflated count model

Background: Unintentional injuries have become a major noncommunicable disease burden, especially among the adolescents. Objective: The current study was conducted to estimate the effect of different aspects of daily activities of adolescence for sustaining serious unintentional injuries in the past 1 year. Methods: A cross-sectional survey with multistage sampling with validated pretested questionnaire was done among the school-going adolescent boys in Kolkata. Poisson regression was used to model the counts of serious injuries. To account for the excess of zero in the outcome, zero-inflated Poisson regression was performed. Results: Among the participants, 73.5% did not report any serious unintentional injury sustained in the past 1 year, 11.9% reported to have sustained serious unintentional injury once in the past 1 year, and rest had more than one count. Statistically significant higher chance of sustaining an episode of injury was found among frequent users of motorbike (incidence rate ratio [IRR]: 1.183), frequently walking on roads (IRR: 1.910), and frequently crossing major roads on bicycle (IRR: 2.181) were observed. A statistically significant protective rate ratio was also obtained for those frequently obeying traffic signals while crossing roads (IRR: 0.493) and frequent users of bicycles (IRR: 0.384). Significantly lower rate ratio for sustaining a serious injury was observed with frequently getting into fight at home (IRR: 0.343) and getting beaten up at school (IRR: 0.595). Conclusions: The study revealed traveling in a car and obeying traffic rules were protective from sustaining serious injury. However, walking and participation in sports appeared to be risky, especially for sustaining another episode of serious injury.