Measures of disability and health-related quality of life are becoming essential parameters in the evaluation of treatment and prevention strategies for reducing the burden of injury. When computing the effectiveness of such measures in health terms, it is frequent to consider pre-injury status as perfect health, as well as the injury status as a chronic health state. These assumptions represent a rough approximation to the actual magnitude of the injury. The objective of this paper is to overcome such assumptions related to pre-injury and injury status, in measures of health-related quality of life. The results will be applied to the evaluation of health losses due to injuries produced by road crashes. Data have been obtained from a Spanish health survey composed of around 60.000 inhabitants. Health-related quality of life is measured on a 0 (death) to 1 (full health) cardinal scale, based on SAH and VAS measures. An estimation of the generic age-health profile of an individual (pre-injury proxy) is performed through interval regression model that controls for a wide variety of socioeconomic and health-related parameters. It is also estimated the age-health profile of an individual that has suffered a severe non-fatal road crash. The health state of the injured will be considered to change over time, according to the results obtained in the model. The total loss of health due to fatal and non-fatal accidents through the period 1996-2004 in Spain has been estimated, in addition to different risk measures by a variety of considerations as gender, age or location. The RESET test demonstrates that there is no evidence of misspecification in the model, and the robustness is checked with success. Quality of life increases with income, education, lower ages, absence of chronic illnesses and healthy style. The estimated health profiles evidence also a higher quality of life related to men. Regarding the practical implementation of the method, it is showed that the quality of life of an individual seriously injured by a traffic crash decreases a 10% on average. In 1996 it is estimated that the years of life lost (YLL) due to fatal crashes rise up to 130.000 (3.37 per thousand inhabitants), whereas in 2004 decrease to 110.000 (2.65 p.t.i.). YLL by women represent no more than 1/4 of the total. YLL due to non-fatal crashes stand for 1/3 of the whole. Disability caused by non-fatal injuries plays a significant role in the total amount of health losses. Monitoring health-related quality of life can be enhanced by estimating the pre-injury status as well as the progress of the health condition through the life path. The main advantage of the suggested methodology is the straightforward application to different targeted groups of population, especially crucial in the context of road crashes, where gender and age considerations should be sustained.