ShareThisThe hazards of childhood change with age.
Take furniture, for instance.
Researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, studied 17 years' worth of injury data to find that an average of 15,000 kids under age 18 wind up in U.S. emergency rooms each year because of injuries sustained when a piece of furniture tipped over. There were 300 deaths during the study period.
The number of injuries has been rising since the early 1990s, despite frequent warnings by the Consumer Product Safety Commission about anchoring television stands and other objects.
"There was a more-than-40 percent increase in the number of injuries during the study period (1990-2007) and the injury rate also significantly increased," said Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the hospital and senior author of the study, which was published online by the journal Clinical Pediatrics in early May.
The researchers found that most furniture tip-over injuries were among children 7 and younger, and resulted from televisions tipping over. More than a quarter of the injuries came when kids pulled over or climbed on furniture. And most of the injuries to younger kids involved the head and neck.
Among older kids, ages 10 to 17, injuries were more likely to happen when desks, bookshelves or cabinets fell over as they were reaching to them, or crawling under them for something. They were more likely to suffer injuries to the lower body.
Smith said that, statistically, boys are more likely to be climbers than girls, but noted that parents need to avoid temptation for all young children by not putting things like prized toys or the television remote high on top of a TV on a stand or up on a shelf or console.
Parents are urged to place television sets close to the floor and near the back of stands, and fasten TVs, stands, shelves and other objects that might tip over to a wall with safety straps or brackets.
Buying furniture with wide legs or solid bases, installing drawer stops on dressers and cabinets, and putting heavy objects on lower shelves can also reduce tip-over risks.
If younger kids favor climbing furniture, older kids often take a different set of risks.
Two studies on teens presented during a recent meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies underscore very different hazards.
Researchers at Eastern Virginia Medical School reported what happened when 21 teen-agers -- 16- to 18-year-olds with at least six months of driving experience -- were put into a driving simulator for 10 minutes while texting or searching for tunes on MP3 players.
Little surprise: The distracted teens slowed down, wove in and out of lanes -- scientifically described as "lane position deviation" -- and, in some tests, mowed down a pedestrian or two.
Another report, by Dr. Karen Wilson of the University of Rochester Medical Center, involved a survey of what teens and early adults (14 to 20) knew about over-the-counter pain medications.
Those in this test group got an average of just 44 percent of answers right in a quiz on acetaminophen, ibuprofen, etc., even though 75 percent said they'd used such over-the-counter drugs in the previous month.
While these respondents said they most often took Tylenol or ibuprofen, and 35 percent said they knew what acetaminophen was, 37 percent did not know that acetaminophen and Tylenol were the same drug.
Wilson noted that while acetaminophen is a safe, effective medicine when taken properly, chronic misuse and overdoses could cause liver damage.
"Plus, there are a lot of compound medications that include acetaminophen and ibuprofen, so it's easy to accidentally take more than you should," Wilson said.
"This tells health professionals that we need to teach young people about the safe use of over-the-counter drugs as part of routine pediatric care," she added.
(Contact Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
THE MEDICAL JOURNAL
