In the past decade, toddlers have suffered from more neck and head injuries than in years past because of TV falling accidents, according to a new study. They are likely to become more common as TVs increase in size and prices come down, said study author Dr. Michael Cusimano of the neurosurgery department at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. As TVs become heavier, they’re more likely to cause fractures and intracranial hemorrhages, which can be fatal.
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There’s an often unrecognized hazard lurking in most Canadian homes that poses a potentially deadly threat to young children: the big-screen TV.
The study also found that older children between two- and five-years-old are also susceptible to injuries as they spend more than 32 hours per week in front of TVs. Most injuries occur when toddlers climb onto furniture to retrieve objects such as toys, or when they bump into unstable TV stands, causing the TVs to topple onto them.
The vast majority (84%) of the injuries occurred in homes and more than three-fourths were unwitnessed by adult caregivers.
Cusimano said TVs are often placed on high furniture such as dressers, which aren’t created to hold TVs, or aren’t properly secured to the wall. “Avoiding placing toys or remotes on top of TVs and place TVs away from the edge of a stand. Manufacturers must produce shorter, more stable TV stands”, the authors noted.
The paper is based on an analysis of 29 studies that looked at TV-related head and neck injuries in seven different countries.
The top-heavy, flat-screen TVs can tumble onto children and crush their small bodies, causing brain or nerve damage, researchers say – and in the worst-case scenario, even fatally damage their skulls.
Between 2008is that2010, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said 19,200 young children in this nation were usually injured by sliding TVs, above 16,500 from 2006overvallen2008.
Once they are old enough to understand, tell children about the dangers of toppling televisions so they understand the reasons for not climbing up on furniture under or near them. Using details from the 29 selected articles, the researchers were able to fill in the blanks about specific risk factors that lead to child injury from toppled television sets. In most situations, the TVs were large and situated off the ground.
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“Those of us involved in managing child brain and spine injuries have no doubt seen a rise in TV-toppling injuries”, wrote Dr. Truc Le and Dr. John Wellons, both of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in an editorial published with the study in Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.
