Abstract
Waters et al.1 suggested that the effects of nicotine withdrawal increase the chances of an accident at work. The second Wednesday of March is ‘No Smoking Day’ (NSD) in the United Kingdom. If the ‘accident effect’ is real, increased numbers of other types of accident would be expected on NSD. I have investigated this possibility by using data from the UK national STATS19 accident reporting system2, which records details of personal injury accidents occurring on public roads in which at least one road vehicle, or a vehicle in collision with a pedestrian, is involved, and which becomes known to the police within 30 days of its occurrence. Damage-only accidents are not included. The date of the accident is also recorded.
Main
I compared the average number of road accidents occurring over the past 10 years (1988-97) on NSD with the average for the Wednesday before and the Wednesday after NSD. Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations of these measures for NSD week and the weeks before and after it. Paired-sample Student's t -tests (one-tailed) did not indicate that there were significantly more accidents on NSD than on the previous Wednesday (t =−1.36, P =0.10) or the following one (t =−0.39, P =0.35).
A visual inspection of the data for the five Wednesdays before and after NSD (Fig. 1) shows no obvious indication that the effects of nicotine withdrawal on NSD led to an increased number of road accidents when compared with the other Wednesdays in February and March. The only feature to stand out is the decrease in accidents between the last Wednesday in February and the first Wednesday in March in 7 of the 10 years examined. No explanation for this effect has been established.
Average number of accidents in 1988-97 on Wednesdays around ‘No Smoking Day’ (NSD).
Similar analyses of the severity of accidents and the age and sex of the drivers involved also provide no evidence of an increased number of accidents on NSD.
References
Waters, A. J., Jarvis, M. J. & Sutton, S. R. Nature 394, 137 (1998).
Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions Road Accidents in Great Britain 1997 (HMSO, London, 1998).
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Knowles, J. Nicotine withdrawal and road accidents. Nature 400, 128 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/22037
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/22037
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