Walking disaster? Why some are accident prone

Have you ever known someone who just couldn't seem to keep from getting hurt, walking off a curb, spraining an ankle, falling down a stairway, rear-ending other cars?

Well, I have!  It's my baby daughter.  When the child was a toddler, I was truly hesitant to take her out in public for fear people would think I beat her.  Her legs stayed black and blue from falls and walking into furniture.

Unfortunately, things didn't get any better in school.  She once fell off the monkey bars while hanging upside down, requiring one of many runs to the emergency room.

By the time she was thirteen, we just kept a set of crutches for her because she sprained her ankles so many times that I totally lost count.

She has fallen down more stairways than I have walked down, has rear-ended more cars than her share, and continues to walk off curbs as though they do not exist.

It is a standing joke in our family about how accident-prone she is.  She good naturedly admits it is so.  However, I often have wondered why she has always been so accident prone.

I may have found the answer.  Researchers have now found that some people truly are more accident-prone than the rest of us.

After reviewing the results of 79 studies which recorded the mishaps and misfortunes of nearly 150,000 people from 15 countries, researchers at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands found that accident-prone people do actually exist. In fact, one out of every 29 people has a 50 percent or higher chance of having an accident than the rest of us.

“Meta-analysis of the general population revealed that accidents cluster in individuals, and that this clustering is higher than the clustering one would expect by chance alone,” the researchers concluded in their 2007 study, published in Accident Analysis and Prevention.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t identify what was responsible for all the bruises, bumps and broken bones, although another study conducted by the University of Delaware offers enticing clues.

The study used neurocognitive tests regularly administered to athletes to measure brain processes like visual and spatial skills and reaction time before and after an injury, in this case, a “noncontact” knee injury, such as one resulting from an error in coordination as opposed to one caused by being tackled. When the test scores of 80 athletes who had injured themselves were compared against 80 athletes who had remained injury-free, researchers discovered something interesting.

“We found that the group that had injured themselves had slower reaction time, they had slower processing speeds and their visual/spatial skills were not as good as the other group,” says Dr. Buz Swanik, associate professor of health, nutrition and exercise sciences at the Universityof Delaware.

I agree with this.  Both my daughter and I have long believed that her visual-spatial skills were not as sharp as the average person's.

 

https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30710797/wid/11915773?GT1=31037