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Biomedical subjects

E McLoughlin

Publications and source records attributed to E McLoughlin.

13 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Unspecified injuries on death certificates: a source of bias in injury research.

Protective gear (for example, helmets and bulletproof vests) shields certain body regions from damaging energy. Failure to specify on death certificates the body region and nature of fatal injuries compromises the utility of mortality data for epidemiologic or prevention research. Of fatally injured California motorcyclists, 41% had no specific injuries listed on their death certificates in 1988. To examine the implications of this problem, the authors abstracted 186 coroner's or medical examiner's reports from four California counties with over 60% nonspecific injuries and one county with few such injuries. These data were merged with computerized death certificate files and with the Fatal Accident Reporting System. Among the 99 cases with nonspecific injury codes, 68% had head injuries, 63% had chest injuries, 58% had abdominal injuries, and 58% had extremity injuries. Reporting sensitivity in the four problem counties varied from 36% for head injury to less than 5% for abdominal, spinal, and extremity injury. The association between head injury and failure to wear a helmet was statistically significant using the coroner's diagnoses (p = 0.02), but not using death certificate diagnoses (p = 0.17). The value of mortality data to injury researchers would be enhanced by better reporting of the nature of injury on death certificates.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed1992

Standard definitions for childhood injury research: excerpts of a conference report.

As awareness of the huge human and other costs of injury has grown, research has expanded. There has not been any standard set of terminology for use in this research. As a result, research and surveillance data are too often difficult to interpret and compare. To overcome this impediment to gains in needed knowledge about childhood injuries, a conference was held in 1989 by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to develop a set of standard definitions. The full conference report is available from the US Government Printing Office. This report presents excerpts, emphasizing those--core--variables likely to be of use to the largest number of investigators. The conference recommendations presented address cross-cutting factors (age, race/ethnicity, location, socioeconomic status, and biopsychosocial development), effect modifiers (exposure, medical risk factors, substance abuse, time, injury severity, and social risk factors), and specific injuries (motor vehicle injuries, central nervous system injuries, falls, fire/burns, drowning, and violence). It is expected that childhood injury investigators will strive to meet the recommendations of this conference and that use of these definitions will lead to improvements in research and, ultimately, to revision of the definitions.

Child↗
PubMed1990

The causes, cost, and prevention of childhood burn injuries.

In 1985, fire and/or burn injuries killed 1461 children aged 0 to 19 years in the United States; an estimated 23,638 children were hospitalized and 440,000 were treated for burns. More than 101,000 life years were lost. A "cost of burn injury" model suggests a dollar value of societal losses from childhood burn deaths and injuries at approximately $3.5 billion. Very young children (0 to 4 years) dying in house fires accounted for 47% of these deaths. Preventing fire deaths through residential sprinklers, smoke detectors, fire-safe cigarettes, and child-resistant lighters would prevent more than three quarters of all childhood fire/burn deaths. While interventions exist for tap water scalds, solutions to the problems of "kitchen" scald and gasoline-involved flame burns are less apparent.

Accident Prevention↗
PubMed1989

Injury mortality and morbidity in New Zealand.

An overview of the injury problem in New Zealand is presented. National mortality and morbidity data demonstrate that relative to other diseases injuries represent a significant community health problem. Injuries are the fourth leading cause of death and account for 32% of Potential Years of Life Lost between the ages of 1 and 70. Injuries are the second leading cause of hospital admission and account for nearly 12% of all admissions. Injury rates vary dramatically by age, sex, socioeconomic status, and race. In general, males, particularly those 20-24 years old, have higher death and hospitalisation rates than females. A notably exception is elderly females, who have a hospitalisation rate nearly twice as high as elderly males. Maori and those from low socioeconomic levels have the highest injury rates. The leading causes of injury death are motor vehicle crashes (37%) and self-inflicted injury (21%). This contrasts to some extent with the two leading causes of hospitalisation, namely falls (25%) and motor vehicle crashes (19%). The road, home, and places of recreation and sport are the most common places of occurrence of serious injury. Head injuries, in particular concussions, and fractures of the lower limbs, particularly the femur, account for 35% of all injury morbidity. Treatment and rehabilitation costs for injuries that resulted in hospitalisations, visits to accident and emergency centres, and a claim on the Accident Compensation Corporation cost an average of $133 (1983) per head of population.

Accidental Falls↗
PubMed1988

Difficulties and bonuses of evaluation: evaluating New Zealand's Children's Nightclothes Act 1977.

Difficulties and bonuses of evaluating injury prevention programmes are illustrated by reference to an evaluation of the New Zealand's Children's Nightclothes Act 1977. It is demonstrated that despite the difficulties encountered in that evaluation, and the equivocal results, there were significant bonuses which more than justified the resources devoted to the evaluation. The paper is presented in an attempt to encourage others to evaluate thermal injury countermeasures who may be hesitant to do so because of the difficulties they foresee.

Burns↗
PubMed1986

Prevention of children's burns: legislation and fabric flammability.

Since 1980, legislation has regulated the ignition characteristics of commercially manufacturered children's nightwear to reduce risk of burns. Between 1971 and 1984, there were 699 hospital discharges of children treated for clothing ignition burns. This evaluation analysed discharge summaries of 493 children, surveyed children's nightwear in 101 retail shops, surveyed 476 Plunket parents regarding home-sewing practices and 28 fabric retailers for fibre content labelling. Burns resulting from clothing ignition, both daywear and nightwear, have decreased slightly in recent years. Most manufactured nightwear for children complied with the regulations. However, in 44% of families, a child might have worn home-sewn and thus unregulated night clothes. Consumers and sales assistants were generally ignorant about fabric flammability. High-fire risk fabrics were recommended by sales assistants and used by home-sewers. The relative involvement of manufactured and home-sewn nightwear in burns should be determined. Children's nightwear and fabrics should bear fibre content labels.

Burns↗
PubMed1985

Burns.

The authors present an extensive review of burn epidemiology. They review sources of burns, preventive tools, emergency behaviors to reduce severity, and rehabilitation. Ways are sketched in which the pediatrician can be an effective advocate against burn injuries.

Accidents, Home↗
PubMed1985

Smoke detector legislation: its effect on owner-occupied homes.

Montgomery County, Maryland was the first major jurisdiction to pass a law requiring smoke detectors in all homes. Smoke detector coverage in the county was evaluated five years after the law's implementation and compared to the coverage in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, which has no such law. Firefighters visited 651 randomly selected owner-occupied homes and tested each detector. While a similar percentage of homes in Montgomery and Fairfax counties complied with detector codes (42 per cent vs 44 per cent, respectively), Montgomery County had a significantly lower percentage of homes with no working detectors (17 per cent vs 30 per cent) and with no detectors at all (6 per cent vs 16 per cent). In general, Montgomery County residents complied with what they believed the law required, but lacked knowledge of the law's details. New homes where building codes required detectors and homes where owners assumed that detectors were required by law were likely to have working detectors. Analyses of 12 years of fire data suggest that as a county approaches complete detector coverage, the risk of residential fire deaths decreases. An essentially unenforced law seems to be obeyed because it conforms to community values.

Data Collection↗
PubMed1979

A comparison of age-specific burn injury rates in five Massachusetts communities.

We measured burn incidence rates for residents of five Massachusetts cities. The data set included all non-occupational burn injuries and cases of smoke inhalation requiring treatment on an inpatient or an outpatient basis in a hospital, occurring between October 1, 1973 and September 30, 1976. Rates of burn injuries by age, and by burn type were calculated for each city. Examination of the data revealed large differences in the magnitude of the age-specific incidence rates among cities but remarkably similar patterns of rates for each city. Differences in the economic status among the cities and among census tracts within the cities appeared to explain a large proportion of the variation in the crude burn rates. A similar specificity of certain types of burn injury by age and sex was common to each city. These findings can be used by health education specialists to design and implement burn prevention programs in these communities appropriate for those individuals at highest risk.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1977

One pediatric burn unit's experience with sleepwear-related injuries.

Review of the records of 678 children with acute injuries referred during an eight-year period to this burn unit indicated that flame burns from a single ignition source (50%) outranked scalds (27%) or house fires (12%) as causes of injury. There was no temporal trend in the rank pattern. The majority of these single-source flame injuries were severe and involved ignition of the child's clothing. From 1969 through 1973, sleepwear was the clothing involved in 32% of the instances. Since that time and coincident with promulgation of strict federal and state standards for flammability of children's night clothing, a dramatic decline in the number of children, referred with injuries of this type has taken place. It is probable that the single factor most important to the decline, in our experience with these injuries, is lower fabric flammability but, because our data may not be representative, corroboration is needed before one can exclude factors such as altered garment design, fire safety-related practices at home, or changing patterns of hospital referral.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1976

Epidemiology of high-tension electrical injuries in children.

Twenty-seven acute high-tension electrical injuries were seen in seven years at the Shriners Burns Institute. All were in boys 7 to 16 years old; 13 suffered amputation(s) and 2 died. Most accidents occurred when boys climbed utility poles (9), trespassed, generally around transformer substations (9), or contacted power lines when tree climbing (5). All occurred in daylight, generally between 4 and 6 PM, on weekends in warm weather with boys in groups. Preventive education directed to this high-risk population should illustrate properties of high-voltage electricity, effects on the body, and how to cope with peer pressures in unstructured time.

Adolescent↗