ABSTRACT

It is widely known that childhood injuries differ with regard to the causes and results from adulthood injuries and most of 1 Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Adli Tıp Anabilim Dalı 2 İzmir Tepecik Eğitim ve Araştırma Hastanesi Geliş tarihi: 09.10.2006 Düzeltme tarihi: 15.11.2006 Kabul tarihi: 23.11.2006 them are preventable. This study aims to constitute a database of injuries among children who were assessed medico-legally in our department.

We investigated 155 cases (36% girls, 64% boys) aged 0-18 (me-an age 10.88) who were admitted to our department between 1998 and 2005. Our most significant finding was that most of the cases were injured by traffic accident, especially pedestrians. The-re were multiple traumas in 51% of the cases. 61% of the cases sta-yed in the hospital and 42% of cases had surgical treatment. We also observed that intentional injuries were more common than other injuries among children over 12 years old and this finding was statistically significant (x2 = 6.321, p= 0.012).

Our study showed that, improving the education in schools and family is a necessity to prevent injuries because of traffic accidents in childhood. In addition, we are in the opinion that more studies are needed for preventing childhood injuries due to violence in our country.

Keywords: Childhood injuries, medicolegal evaluation, traf-fic accident, violence.