Neonatal and Pediatric Medicine
Open Access

Abstract

Unintentional injuries are accidents that pose a major health problem among school children. This study compared functional behavior and executive function characteristics of school-aged children who experienced unintentional injuries to those of controls who had not been injured. We looked into background characteristics of injured children, injury characteristics, and parents’ perceptions related the children’s functional behaviors and executive function abilities. The study included 53 children, aged 6 years to 18 years. Of them, 32 had experienced unintentional injuries; 21 children who had not experienced unintentional injuries served as a control group matched for age and living environment. Parents of both groups answered a demographic questionnaire on their children’s background, daily functional behavior characteristics, and (as applicable) injury characteristics. Parents also completed the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF). Results showed that no child in the control (uninjured) group had been pre-diagnosed with learning disabilities or attention deficits hyperactive disorders, but 60% of the children in the research (injured) group had been. Most (60%) injuries were limb fractures, and most (50%) were sustained outside the home. Parents of children who had been injured expressed significantly more concerns about their children’s daily behavior than did parents of the control group and reported their children as usually but not always independent and responsible. Furthermore, compared to the children in the uninjured group, children in the injured group had significantly lower executive function abilities in the BRIEF’s eight subscales, total behavioral-regulation and metacognitive indices, and global executive function scores (p < .001). Children with certain diagnoses, functional behavior features, and deficient executive function abilities may be at risk for unintentional injuries. Raising awareness of these aspects may contribute to identification, treatment, and prevention of those accidental injuries among at-risk children.

Biography

Prof. Rosenblum completed her doctorate in occupational Therapy at the faculty of Medicine, Hebrew university Jerusalem in 2003. Parallel to her post- doctorate at the laboratory of robotics at the Technicon, she joined as a faculty member to the Occupational Therapy department at the University of Haifa where she directed her research to the characteristics of human daily function. Rosenblum aim to gain better insight into interactions between varied body functions (e.g., cognitive, motor, sensory), activity performance and participation abilities of people faced with functional deficits in everyday life due to neurodevelopmental or neurological diseses.