Study finds age, economic status are factors
Children younger than 1 year old are more likely to be hospitalized for abuse than suffer from sudden infant death syndrome, a first-of-its-kind study has found.
More than 4,500 children were hospitalized for serious abuse in 2006, according to researchers at the Yale School of Medicine. Of those, 300 died from their injuries.
Tens of thousands more are treated each year at hospitals but are not admitted.
The study, published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics, shows that the youngest children, and those on Medicaid, were at the highest risk.
The study is the first to quantify the severity of abuse and determine whether a child was admitted to a hospital. It puts hard figures behind the anecdotes many clinicians already know by heart.
“The results don’t really surprise me,” said Dr. Jonathan Thackeray, medical director for Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Center for Family Safety and Healing. “There’s a good body of literature now that suggest socioeconomic status is a risk factor for abuse.”
The study found that children on Medicaid, a health-care program for poor people, were six times more likely to end up in a hospital with injuries from abuse.
That mirrors Nationwide Children’s figures: 81 percent of children admitted for an abusive head injury were younger than 1 year old. And 93 percent came from uninsured families or those on Medicaid.
For Thackeray and his colleagues, the study provides more information than the abuse databases that experts already use. Each number in the study represents a specific case of abuse, such as an infant covered in bruises or a 3-month-old with head trauma.
“It is a new way to look at how frequent serious physical abuse is,” Thackeray said. “We haven’t had a really good estimate to what the burden is.”
Another indication is the number of calls Franklin County Children Services has received to its child-abuse hot line. The agency took 28,000 calls and opened 13,000 investigations last year. About 75 percent of those were child-abuse or -neglect cases.
Executive Director Chip Spinning said all families are susceptible.
“We believe the stresses associated with economic conditions cause a spark that could put a child at risk, and we are addressing that with as many resources as we can,” he said in a statement.
The importance of putting resources into prevention was highlighted in a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month that estimates that child abuse costs about $124 billion in health care, loss of adult productivity and recovery measures each year.
These studies could help advocates push for prevention, whether it is in support groups or home visits, Thackeray said. “It’s leverage for us to go to the policymakers to say, ‘This is where you should be investing your dollars.’ ”
The CDC study looked at 579,000 children nationwide in 2008 who survived abuse or neglect and 1,740 who died because of it.
In their lifetimes, the cost of treating surviving children will reach $210,000 per person, more than the victim of a stroke or many Type 2 diabetes cases, the federal agency said. That includes medical and legal costs, counseling and lost productivity.
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