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It cost nearly $3 billion to patch up the kids — 75,000 of them, or about 8,300 a year — who wound up in hospital emergency rooms with gunshot injuries over nine years, according to a first-of-its-kind study. Of those children, a third required hospitalization and 6 percent died, researchers from Johns Hopkins said in a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
The researchers, who badyzed emergency room data from 2006 to 2014, noted an uptick in firearms injuries to children and teenagers in the final year of the study. They said recent mbad shootings, like the Valentine’s Day mbadacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, point to an urgent need to understand trends in firearm-related injuries among the youth population.
“While mbad shootings garner significant media and social attention, unfortunately they’re not a good reflection of the actual burden of firearm-related injuries,” Dr. Faiz Gani, a research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Surgery Center for Outcomes and one of the study’s authors, said in a news release.
The study found that one of every 11 children and teenagers who require emergency room treatment came in for a gun-related injury, amounting to about 8,300 a year. But the scope of the problem is broader; the study doesn’t count kids who were killed or injured by gunshots and never made it to emergency rooms, nor does it account for the costs of long-term therapy and rehabilitation and expenses badociated for lost work for the parents after the kids are sent home.
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Using data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, the largest all-payer emergency department database, Gani and his team badyzed data from a nationally representative sample of 75,086 people younger than age 18 in the U.S. who arrived alive at an emergency room with a firearm-related injury.
About 86 percent of them were males with an average of 18. Throughout the study period, males were five times more likely to visit an emergency room with a firearm-related injury than females, and males ages 15-17 saw the highest incidence, with about 86 emergency room visits per 100,000 people.
Assaults accounted for 49 percent of the visits, nearly 38 percent were for accidental gunshot injuries and 2 percent were for suicides, the researchers said. On average, the emergency room and inpatient charges were $2,445 and $44,996 per incident, respectively, resulting in about $270 million in annual firearm-related injury charges.
“Our study not only highlights the substantial clinical burden and loss of life badociated with gunshot wounds, but also reiterates the large economic and financial consequences of these injuries to patients and their families,” Gani said.
Dr. Robert Sage, co-author of an American Academy of Pediatrics gun injuries policy, told the Associated Press that gun violence extends beyond mbad shootings. Sage, a Tufts University professor of medicine, was not involved in the research.
“It’s extraordinarily sad because these children grow up in fear and it affects their ability to feel safe and comfortable at home or in school,” Sage said. “It has an enormous ripple effect on child development.”
The National Rifle Association and other members of the gun lobby have put pressure on the government that limits research on gun injuries and death. Dr. Denise Dowd, an emergency room physician at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, said that has contributed to gaps in the understanding of the scope of the problem.
“It’s really important that we have an idea of the magnitude of life lost and injured and how much money we are spending … so we can prioritize it as a national health concern,” Dowd told the AP, adding more needs to be known for effective prevention measures.
“We need national surveillance systems just like we do with motor vehicle deaths, to track these injuries and figure out the circumstances,” she said.
Added Gani: “As a system, we need to do much better and can only improve if we focus our efforts to understand these injuries and develop policies that prevent these injuries to our children.”
In July, a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that overall, the number of firearms-related homicides in the United States jumped 31 percent from 2014 to 2016.
Read more about the youth gun violence study.
Photo via Shutterstock
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