For kids, car crashes and obesity don’t mix

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Add one more risk to the list of hazards for overweight kids: car crashes.

Safety experts already knew that obese adults were more likely to suffer serious injuries in an automobile wreck, and a new study published online Wednesday in the journal Injury Prevention shows that children share the risk.

Overall, overweight and obese kids were only slightly more likely to suffer serious injuries in a wreck, but they were more than 2.5 times more likely to suffer damage to their arms and legs, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Car crashes kill about 8,000 children in the United States each year and for teenagers are one of the leading causes of accidental injury. Known risk factors include riding in an older car, sitting in the front seat, not wearing a seat belt and being in a severe crash.

Keshia M. Pollack of the Bloomberg School’s Center for Injury Research and Policy and her colleagues studied 3,232 children ages 9 to 15 who were involved in 2,873 crashes. They restricted the study to children over 5 feet tall, so that none were using booster seats; 96% were wearing seat belts; and 34% were overweight or obese.

Overall, 1.78% of children sustained a serious injury, with the incidence ranging from 1.2% for underweight children to 2.06% for overweight ones. Although the obese and overweight children were slightly more likely to be injured, the difference was not statistically significant. But when researchers broke down the data by parts of the body, overweight children were 2.64 times more likely to suffer a serious injury to arms and legs.

The team is not sure what caused the finding. Some research indicates that obese children are more prone to fractures, perhaps because their bones are less sturdy. It may also be that their increased weight renders the impact of a collision more severe -- it is, after all, harder to stop a heavy object than a light one.

--Thomas H. Maugh II