An investigation led by researchers at UC Davis has discovered that the number of children hospitalized for skin and soft-tissue infections, mainly due to community-acquired Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), has more than doubled since 2000. The investigation is published online in the journal Academic Pediatrics.
Senior author, Patrick S. Romano, said:
“Often parents don’t recognize that their kid’s abscess or other soft-tissue infections might be MRSA because the child hasn’t been in nursing homes or hospitals, where you usually think of getting staph infections. It’s usually pretty easy to treat, if you treat it early and know what you’re looking for.”
The investigators gathered data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) from over 40 states between 2000 and 2007, to trace shifts in the reasons why children are hospitalized, and outcomes of those hospitalizations.
Admissions for severe skin infections currently ranks as the 7th most common reason for hospital admission among children in the USA, in comparison to 2000 when it was ranked 13th. The biggest increase came in the period from 2000 to 2005, which is attributable to the manner in which physicians treated MRSA.
Romano explained; “In the early part of the decade, clinicians generally didn’t recognize the growing prevalence of community-acquired MRSA,” differentiating between MRSA cases that occur in hospital settings or nursing homes, and the growing proportion of cases that occur in the community among otherwise healthy people. “Starting around 2005, physicians began treating community-acquired MRSA more effectively.”
Once parents are better educated to look for signs of MRSA in their children and get early treatment for it, hospitalizations will likely decrease, he said.
The increased rate of hospitalizations is associated with the rise in the prevalence of bacterium in the community overall. Children who are affected by the bacterium may have come across it inside or outside their homes, stated Romano.
He added:
“We don’t generally recommend that parents be too compulsive about washing their houses down with antiseptic. Hand-washing is always an important precaution.”
- A decrease in teen pregnancy hospitalizations – down almost 25% since 2000
- A decrease in drug poisoning among teens aged 15-19, paralleling reduced suicide rates which, since the mid-1990s, have generally been on the decline.
- A significant decrease in admission rates for asthma and diabetes, despite some increases in certain subpopulations.
- A decrease in the rate of potentially preventable hospitalizations nationwide, largely due to a substantial decrease in admissions of children in the West and South.
- A decline in hospital stay disparities between low- and high-income neighborhoods, more so in the West and South.
- Improvements in several measures of patient safety, such as unintentional punctures of the lung during medical procedures.
- A steadily increasing role for Medicaid, which pays for approximately half of all hospitalizations for children nationwide.
A complimentary statistical brief also reported that influenza increased significantly as a major reported cause of hospitalizations for children 17 and under from 2000 to 2009, which for a large part may be due to improved reporting. Collectively, the two papers act as a baseline prior to the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a crucial feature of which is an expansion of health insurance coverage.
Written by Grace Rattue