Temporal and geographic patterns of stab injuries in young people: a retrospective cohort study from a UK major trauma centre
Vulliamy, Paul Faulkner, Mark Kirkwood, Graham West, Anita O'Neill, Breda Griffiths, Martin P. Moore, Fionna Brohi, Karim
Vulliamy, Paul
Faulkner, Mark
Kirkwood, Graham
West, Anita
O'Neill, Breda
Griffiths, Martin P.
Moore, Fionna
Brohi, Karim
Citations
Altmetric:
Journal Title
Book Title
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Publication Begin Page
Publication End Page
Publication Number of Pages
Abstract
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/10/e023114.long
Objectives To describe the epidemiology of assaults
resulting in stab injuries among young people. We
hypothesised that there are specific patterns and risk
factors for injury in different age groups.
Design Eleven-year retrospective cohort study.
Setting Urban major trauma centre in the UK.
Participants 1824 patients under the age of 25 years
presenting to hospital after a stab injury resulting from
assault.
Outcomes Incident timings and locations were obtained
from ambulance service records and triangulated
with prospectively collected demographic and injury
characteristics recorded in our hospital trauma registry.
We used geospatial mapping of individual incidents
to investigate the relationships between demographic
characteristics and incident timing and location.
Results The majority of stabbings occurred in males from
deprived communities, with a sharp increase in incidence
between the ages of 14 and 18 years. With increasing age,
injuries occurred progressively later in the day (r2
=0.66,
p<0.01) and were less frequent within 5 km of home
(r2
=0.59, p<0.01). Among children (age <16), a significant
peak in injuries occurred between 16:00 and 18:00 hours,
accounting for 22% (38/172) of injuries in this group
compared with 11% (182/1652) of injuries in young adults.
In children, stabbings occurred earlier on school days
(hours from 08:00: 11.1 vs non-school day 13.7, p<0.01)
and a greater proportion were within 5 km of home (90%
vs non-school day 74%, p=0.02). Mapping individual
incidents demonstrated that the spike in frequency in
the late afternoon and early evening was attributable to
incidents occurring on school days and close to home.
Conclusions Age, gender and deprivation status are
potent influences on the risk of violent injury in young
people. Stab injuries occur in characteristic temporal
and geographical patterns according to age group, with
the immediate after-school period associated with a
spike in incident frequency in children. This represents
an opportunity for targeted prevention strategies in this
population.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/8/10/e023114.full.pdf
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-023114