Burden of Sport Injuries in the European Union - Safety in Sports

7 Disabilities
7.1 Methodology
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7 | February 2012
Probably the most expensive and most grievous consequences of injuries are longterm
or even life-long disabilities. It is clear that sport injuries lead in many cases to
long-term consequences, e.g. due to ligament ruptures. So far, there are no comparable
measures available which allow for the comparison of groups of injuries regarding
their risk of disabilities. The various national and regional data, which are based
on insurance or welfare statistics (e.g. on disability pensions, attendance allowances,
restrictions of employability), are hardly comparable due to the varying systems.
Usual indicators for severity, as the commonly used Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS)
(Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine 2005) are less vivid, as
they do not provide a distinction between severe injuries which can be cured completely
and injuries which affects the life permanently. Such severity indicators do
not allow for estimating the health burden of groups of injuries in terms of disability-
Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), which is a convincing measure for the overall health
burden due to a specific disease. DALYs combine mortality and morbidity indicators
into one easily understandable measure and are the simple sum of Year of Life Lost
(YLLs) due to premature death, and Years Lived with Disabilities YLDs (Murray
1996, Polinder et al. 2007).
A relatively new method for calculating the risk for disability of injuries has been
proposed by Van Beeck et al. (2007), the so-called Injury Disability Weight (IDW) (see
also Haagsma et al. 2008, 2010, Belt & al. 2010). Van Beek & at (2007) have established
probability weights for long-term disabilities assigned to 39 groups of ICD injury
diagnoses, and this methodology has been further developed for the EU IDB under
the INTEGRIS-project (“Improved methodology for data collection on accidents and
disabilities”). The INTEGRIS disability component is calculated by multiplying the
number of injury cases with a certain health outcome and a predefined empirically
established disability weight (table/figure 14). For example, an injury patient with
brain-skull injury treated at the ED has a disability weight of 0.09, whereas for hospitalized
patients the disability weight is 0.241. 13% of the ED and 23% of the HDR cases
with brain-skull injury suffer from lifelong consequences; the disability weight for
these lifelong consequences is 0.323. The YLD of lifelong injury is then calculated by
multiplying the number of cases with lifelong injury, the disability weight and the
average duration.