Socioeconomic differences in Swedish children and adolescents injured in road traffic incidents: cross sectional study

Traffic related injuries are among the most common causes of death in childhood and in youth.1 Young people belonging to a low social class and living in deprived socioeconomic areas are consistently at greater risk than others. 2 3 The extent to which socioeconomic differences in risks from traffic injury vary during childhood and adolescence deserves consideration. 4 5 We examined socioeconomic patterning in Swedish children and adolescents injured in road traffic incidents, considering four categories of road users. We created a dataset of about 2.2 million children and adolescents (aged 0-19 years) living in Sweden at some time during 1990-4 by linking records from 13 Swedish national registers. We established their sex and year of birth by linking the Swedish population register to the national censuses of 1985 or 1990 or to the medical register …