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 "Parents, family members and caregivers need to be mindful of the
risk of leaving an infant or child unattended on a bed or sofa,
regardless of how soft the furniture appears or how far from the
edge they place their child," study co-author Dr. Viachaslau Bradko
told Reuters Health by email.
"Just as healthcare providers discuss special car seats for safe
transport of children, they should remind families of the hazards of
benign-appearing furniture to an unattended child," said Bradko, an
orthopedic surgeon at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston.
His team presented their findings on November 5 at the American
Academy of Pediatrics annual conference in Orlando, Florida.
The researchers analyzed a decade of data on injuries treated in
emergency rooms from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance
System of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Sampling and analysis revealed an estimated 2.3 million children
younger than 5 who were treated for sofa- and bed-related injuries
in 2007-2016. That translates to a yearly average of 115.2 injuries
per 10,000 kids in this age group in the general population.
The numbers place soft furniture falls well ahead of other causes of
injury. The next most frequent cause, stair-related accidents,
occurred at an average rate of 46.8 per 10,000 kids during the study
period.
"We were surprised at how common these injuries were. In fact, we
found they were three times more common than injuries from stairs,"
Bradko said.
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Infants younger than 12 months of age suffered a larger than average
share of the soft-furniture injuries, accounting for 27.7 percent of
the total. Those youngest patients were also more than twice as
likely to need hospitalization.
Boys made up slightly more of the injured overall than girls, at 55
percent versus 45 percent, the study found. Soft tissue damage and
lacerations were the most common types of injury and three in five
children had injuries to the face and head.
If there is good news, it may be that few of these injuries - only
2.7 percent - required hospitalization. But the bad news is that
these injuries appear to be getting more common. During the study
period, bed- and sofa-related injuries increased nearly 17 percent
overall.
"In reality, the numbers are even higher, as not all falls result in
the child going to the emergency department," said Dr. Jordan Taylor
of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who was
not involved in the research.
"As the authors mention, these falls don't often result in
hospitalization, but the cost implications for all the emergency
department visits is significant. Education and prevention are
likely the key to reversing this trend, though more studies looking
deeper into the injury patterns could be helpful," Taylor noted.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2PhWNOE American Academy of Pediatrics
meeting, online November 5, 2018.
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