Assessing the generalizability of a National Burn Database to the United States pediatric burn injury population.
Sujata Dalal, M Victoria Purvis Miles, Kyra Jeanine Solis-Beach and 7 others
PMID 39611327WHAT IT FOUND
Pediatric burn data from U.S. hospitals mixes U.S. and Mexico residents, who have different burn causes and severity.
Researchers must analyze these groups separately. Pooling them creates a distorted picture that does not represent the typical U.S. pediatric burn population.
Key findings
01Children from Mexico had larger burns and longer hospital stays than U.S. residents across all age groups.
02Burn causes differed by group: scalds were most frequent in U.S. children under 5, while fire/flame burns were more frequent in Mexican children of all ages.
03The study concludes that Mexico residents in this database are not representative of the general pediatric burn population in the United States or Mexico due to transfer biases.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The Mexican residents in the database are not representative of all children in Mexico, as only those with severe burns were transferred to U.S. hospitals. Children who died before reaching the U.S. or those with smaller burns treated locally in Mexico are missing from the dataset. It is unknown if Mexican residents received equivalent medical and rehabilitation care compared to U.S. residents, which could affect outcome comparisons. Some data fields, such as place of injury and etiology, had missing values for a small number of patients.
Declared interests
One author declares financial support from MediWound Ltd., NIH, Department of Defense, and ASPR, and serves on the American Burn Association Board of Trustees. The study was funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that pooled data from this national burn database represents the general pediatric burn population in the United States. The inclusion of Mexican residents, who had significantly larger and more severe burns due to transfer criteria, skews the overall severity profile.