Researchers say that injuries among kids due to TV falls have increased at an alarming rate.
Children are often involved in different activities, which can turn into disasters if left unnoticed. Researchers have found that injuries caused among children from falling televisions have increased by 95 percent over the last two decades.
For the study, researchers looked at the data involving television-related injuries among children below 17 years between 1990 and 2011. They also noted the gender, intensity of the injury, part of the body injured and the nature of the injury. The mean age of the injured children was 4.7 and children younger than 5 years accounted for a majority of the injuries with 64.3 percent. Children aged between 5 to 10 years represented 24.3 percent and those between 11 to 17 years old added up to 11.4 percent. Researchers noted that 60.8 percent were male patients.
The authors of the study looked at 380,885 reports from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System of children reporting to an emergency department for television-relation injuries during the study period.
The study found that rate of injured children from TV falls increased by 125.5 percent for children below 5 years over the course of the study. Overall, 95.3 percent children were injured with television falls. Based on injury circumstances, television falls were the most common type of injury (52.5 percent). Children striking a television was the second most common cause of injury (38.1 percent).
"Despite the relatively low documentation ... of the type of furniture on which falling TVs were placed, the frequency of dressers/ bureaus/chests of drawers/armoires being used to support TVs (almost half of the cases in this study) is alarming," authors wrote in the journal, according to MedPageToday. "As noted in previous studies, children may pull dresser drawers open to use as stairs to help them reach the TV, potentially pulling both the dresser and TV over onto themselves."
Head and neck were the most common body parts involved in these types of injuries, accounting for 63.3 percent.
Authors of the study cautioned parents to place TVs in safer areas considering all safety precautions like using brackets and other tethers to anchor the furniture suitably.
The findings are published in the journal Pediatrics.
