THURSDAY, Dec. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Obese children are more likely than other children to sustain injuries to the upper and lower extremities when they are involved in a car crash, according to study findings published in the December issue of Injury Prevention.
Keshia M. Pollack, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and colleagues conducted a study of 3,232 children aged 9 to 15 years who were involved in 2,873 motor vehicle accidents, of whom 502 (15 percent) sustained an Abbreviated Injury Severity 2+ injury to any part of the body.
While 34 percent of the subjects were obese, this did not raise the overall risk of injury, but when the investigators analyzed the data according to body region they found that compared with normal weight children, overweight and obese children were more than 2.5 times as likely to sustain Abbreviated Injury Severity 2+ injuries to their extremities.
"Our finding of no overall increased risk of injury, but increased risk of injury to the extremities, was consistent with similar research in adults," the authors write. "For children, we suspect that the differences in body part injured by body mass index may be due to a combination of physiology and biomechanical factors."
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