Some people have all the bad luck. Whether you call them accident-prone, or just unfortunate, there's a group of people who really do have more mishaps than others.

Everyone seems to know a comic or tragic figure who tends to get into scrapes, but until now it has been hard to show whether they are genuinely more accident-prone than others. To answer this question, Ellen Visser and colleagues at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands analysed the results of 79 studies which examined how prone people are to having accidents. In all, the studies recorded the mishaps suffered by 147,000 people, drawn from the general population in 15 countries.

Strikingly, it appears that there is a discrete group of people who suffer the most accidents: 1 in 29 people have a 50 per cent higher chance of having an accident than the rest of the population (Accident Analysis and Prevention, DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2006.09.012).