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June 16, 2006
STUDY UNDERSCORES BENEFITS OF CHILD RESTRAINTS
A new study has found that children who were using child restraints were 28 percent less likely to be killed in a crash than children who were wearing seat belts alone. Published in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, the research from the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia studied results for nearly 9,000 children aged two through six involved in serious motor vehicle crashes. When cases of gross misuse of a child restraint were included in the crash analysis -- for example, if the restraint was not attached to the vehicle seat or the child was not wearing the harness, the overall reduction of risk declined to 21 percent.
"For every 100 children who were killed in a crash wearing only a seat belt, 28 of them would have survived if they'd been in a car seat or booster seat," explained study author Dennis Durbin, M.D., M.S.C.E., a pediatric emergency medicine physician and co-scientific director at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention. "These findings build on many years of real-world and laboratory research which has consistently found child restraints to be very effective at preventing injuries."
Posted by MVHAP at June 16, 2006 12:13 PM