Child abuse injuries resulted in 4,500 hospitalizations and 300 fatalities in just one year in the USA, researchers from Yale School of Medicine reported in the journal Pediatrics. This is the first study that has quantified abuse severity and how many children ended up in hospital, the authors added. Child Protective Services had only tracked occurrence of child abuse at a national level.
Dr. John M. Leventhal and team set out to find out what the incidence of hospitalizations due to child abuse among children under 18 years of age might be. They gathered data from the 2006 Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), which is part of AHRQ (the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality).
They found that:
- 4,569 kids where admitted to hospital in 2006 because of serious abuse
- 300 of them did not survive
- Those at the highest risk of being hospitalized were aged twelve months or less (58.2 per 100,000 kids compared to the average 6.2 per 100,000)
They defined serious abuse as “any child who was admitted to the hospital with an injury that was coded as abuse”. Examples included a 3-month old baby with multiple bruises caused by abuse, as well as another baby of the same age with life-threatening abusive head trauma. Those with suspicious injuries who were subsequently diagnosed as having injuries not linked to abuse were not included.
Dr. Leventhal said:
“These numbers are higher than the rate of sudden infant death syndrome (about 50, per 100,000 births), which is alarming. speaks to the importance of poverty as a risk factor for serious abuse.”
The authors wrote that children covered by Medicaid were six times as likely to suffer serious abuse compared to other children.
Such hospitalizations cost the nation $73.8 million in one year.
Leventhal added:
“These data should be useful in examining trends over time and in studying the effects of large-scale prevention programs.”
Written by Christian Nordqvist