Identifying major risk factors for serious injury: Report on the first prospective linkage of the New Zealand Blood Donors Health Study.

Abstract

In 1998 a cohort was assembled of Blood Donors in New Zealand in order to conduct longitudinal analyses to assess risk factors for various health-related outcomes. This report was a report commissioned to: * evaluate the practicalities of linkage with nationally-held health outcomes data (hospitalisations and deaths), * report serious injury-related event rates, * assess power to evaluate selected risk factors (alcohol consumption, marijuana use, chronic sleepiness, and risky behaviour), and * determine how long investigators should wait before they should undertake a larger, formal study of health outcomes. The cohort of 22,000 blood donors in New Zealand is unusual in that 36% of the donors were at that time students or aged under 25 years. This is a difficult group to recruit for long-term cohort studies. We were able to link 21,000 of those to health outcomes information provided by the Ministry of Health. At the time we analysed the data, 144,000 years of follow-up had accrued, with 300 serious falls and 193 serious motor vehicle crash injuries. The report demonstrated that: * the original forms design led to some females being incorrectly recorded as males: where NHI gender and questionnaire they differ in this respect, gender as specified by the NHI record should be used in analyses * a positive relationships of alcohol consumption, marijuana use, chronic sleepiness, and risky behaviour with serious motor vehicle injury, and also marijuana use with serious fall injury. This was the first linkage of health outcomes data for this cohort. It is anticipated that further funding will be sought to appraise the evidence for other outcomes and enable sub-group analyses on the outcomes and risks already identified. The work was funded by both ACC and ALAC. The full-text report uploaded is the version provided to ACC. A very similar one was provided to ALAC and is not included as a separate research output.