Percentage of injuries for children on lap of another person was higher for younger age groups
MONDAY, Sept. 18, 2017 (HealthDay News) — Young children injured going down a slide on someone’s lap most commonly experience leg fractures, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, held from Sept. 16 to 19 in Chicago.
Charles Jennissen, M.D., from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City, and colleagues used data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System to identify playground injuries among 12,686 children age 5 years and younger from 2002 to 2015.
The researchers found that 352,698 children aged younger than 6 years were injured on slides during the study period (59 percent male). The highest percentage of injured children was seen among those aged 12 to 23 months (22 percent). Fracture was the most frequent diagnosis (36 percent), and 19 percent of injuries were lacerations. The lower extremity was the affected body part in 26 percent of those injured. The percentages of injuries involving the lower extremity and of children noted to be on the lap of another person at the time of injury were higher the younger the age group of the child (both P < 0.001). The injuries involved the lower extremity in 94 percent of cases (577/614 cases) with narratives mentioning that the child was on a person’s lap.
“Many parents and caregivers go down a slide with a young child on their lap without giving it a second thought,” Jennissen said in a statement.
Copyright © 2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
