Researchers found that infants or children under the age of one are more likely to experience physical abuse compared to those belonging to different age groups.
The study findings signify that the severity of injuries sustained by these young children causes them to have three times more risk of dying compared to other children who experienced other forms of trauma.
In children, non-accidental injury (NAI) is a vital cause of significant injury. In 2012, Trauma Audit Research Network (TARN), which collects information about severely abused children across UK hospitals and is the primary data source for the recent study, discovered that purposeful physical trauma is a notable injury cause among young children.
TARN's discovery urged researchers from UK universities to investigate if abused children share a common profile that may aid experts to detect abuse more efficiently and thus promote early referral to specialist care.
TARN's data are classified into different injury mechanisms by intent. The information source contains data collated from January 2004 to December 2013. Hospitals that contribute information categorized their reported cases into accidental injury (AI), suspected child abuse (SCA) or alleged assault (AA).
All in all, the study consisted of 14,845 children, 13,708 of which were categorized as AI, 769 as SCA and 368 as AA.
The findings of the study showed that 97.7 percent of severely injured cases of SCA happened among children under five years of age, 76.3 percent of which occurred in infants under age one.
"This study highlights that major injury occurring as a result of SCA has a typical demographic pattern," the authors wrote. They added that this common pattern involve children under the age of one to suffer from more severe injury.
Children who suffered from abuse were also found to have had more severe injury, higher rate of head injuries and greater mortality rates, compared to those who suffered from accidental injury, which commonly involves damage to arms and legs.
"It may simply be that the more robust physique of an older child means that major trauma is more difficult to inflict," the authors suggested.
The study was published in the Emergency Medicine Journal.
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