Epidemiology of cycling road injuries-related deaths

There are now several lines of evidence that millions of people around the world use bicycles as a routine means of transportation. In the US alone, for example, the website Statista estimates that 55 million people use bicycles as primary or complementary mode of transportation, with a trend that has been steadily increasing over the past decade. However, as to our knowledge there is no recent data on mortality of cyclists in traffic accidents, we planned an analysis to specifically fill this gap. We conducted a digital search of the ultimate version of the Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network, to retrieve data on cyclist road injuries over the past three decades. Overall, the age-standardized mortality for cyclist road injuries has substantially decreased, by 13%, from 0.91 (95%CI, 1.16-0.77) ×100,000 in 1991 to 0.80 (95%CI, 0.90-0.67) ×100,000 in 2019. Throughout the observational period, the cumulative mortality was always higher in men than in women. The highest mortality for these types of injuries involves the older people.