乌鸦传媒

ORLANDO – Softly-cushioned sofa or beds do not appear to protect small children from hard landings sending them to the emergency department, researchers cautioned here at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Analysis of U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission data indicated that 2.3 million children under the age of 5 were injured in soft-furniture related mishaps from 2007 to 2016 – an average of 230,036 such injuries a year, according to David Liu, BA, a 4th-year medical student at Baylor College of Medicine, and colleagues from Texas Children's Hospital in Houston.

At a press conference, Liu said that 62% of the injuries occurred to the child's head and face. Fortunately, just 2.7% of the cases required that the children be hospitalized. Infants less than a year old accounted for 28% of the injuries, however, and were twice as likely to be hospitalized as older children.

The weighted national estimates indicated that about a third of the cases involved children falling out of beds or sofas; 16.7% of the children were injured when they jumped from the furniture and 41% of the children were injured in other types of accidents involving the furniture, the researchers reported.

Liu said he got interested in the topic while working in the emergency department, and seeing three soft furniture-related injuries to children in a single shift. He then started researching how often these injuries occurred. "It turns out it is one of the most frequent types of injuries," he said. "Often times we hear about falls related to stairs, but bed- and sofa-related injuries are almost 2.5 times [more common] than injuries related to stairs in children."

He said that during the 10-year study period, the risk of injury related to the furniture increased with time. "While we think that soft furniture is inherently safe, it turns out they are not," Liu said. "Obviously we can't put gates and barriers on every bed in America but maybe we can raise awareness that soft furniture may not be that safe."

Co-author William Phillips, MD, of Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children's Hospital, offered a disturbing sidelight to the study findings. "Sadly, non-accidental trauma is common at our hospital, and very often the presentation is a story that is unfortunately fiction," he said.

"While bed injuries do happen they are rarely serious. Our radar goes up a bit when we have a family that says, 'Well, my kid fell off a bed onto a carpeted floor' and yet they have a femur fracture or something like that," Phillips told 乌鸦传媒. "Unfortunately our study could not tweak that out of the large database. All we can report is the raw numbers."

Army Capt. Saira Ahmed, MD, a pediatrics resident at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, made a similar observation.

"One of the things you have to take into consideration when you have one of the injuries that are called bed-related is the child's age and development," she told 乌鸦传媒. "If the mother comes in and says, 'Oh, the kid rolled off the bed' and the baby is, like, 1 month old -- well, I know that babies don't roll at that age. So every case you have to look at individually and what the injuries are but I have encountered suspicious falls from beds in my practice."