By Gene Emery
BOSTON, Jan 22 (Reuters) - Attention U.S. motorists: You may want to drive more carefully on the way home from Sunday's Super Bowl party, especially if you live in the state that fields the losing team.
A study of the last 27 Super Bowl Sundays concluded that the highway death rate jumped 70 percent in the first hour after the big game and remained high over the next few hours.
The increase was particularly dramatic in states with the losing team, where the death rate was 147 percent higher than the Sundays before and after the championship.
The only exception was in states with the winning team, where highway death rates did not rise, according to Donald Redelmeier, the chief author of the study.
If the trend holds this Sunday -- when the Oakland Raiders square off against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL championship match -- seven extra people will die on U.S. highways and 600 more will be injured in traffic accidents just because it is Super Bowl Sunday.
That's a higher toll than on New Year's Eve, said Redelmeier, of the University of Toronto.
"We were surprised by the magnitude of the increase in mortality, and that it was so widespread through the U.S., and so consistent throughout the decade. It wasn't a function of whether the game was good, or the point spread, or the score at halftime," he told Reuters.
Alcohol may play a role in the trend, he said, but that doesn't explain why the death rate is lower in the winning states where, presumably, fans also celebrate with a victory drink or two.
"We think part of it is fatigue and distraction," he said. Weary fans, especially of the losing team, keep replaying the loss in the heads, reviewing what went wrong. "The Monday-morning quarterbacking begins Sunday, not Monday night. The result is a surge in fatality rates."
The researchers, in a letter published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, said they found a 10 percent drop in the accident rate during the game itself -- presumably because fewer people are on the road -- but the post-game accidents more than made up for the reduction.
Redelmeier said fans should avoid unnecessary night driving on Super Bowl Sunday, hospital trauma centers should consider putting extra workers on duty that evening, and states should offer free public transit after the game to keep more people off the streets.
During the Sundays flanking the Super Bowl, there are usually 3,000 crashes, 1,300 injuries and 17 deaths. On Super Bowl Sunday, the number of crashes typically jumps to over 4,000, with 1,900 injuries and 24 deaths.