A Clinical Study of Child Abuse Present to In-hospital Child Abuse Center

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To promote awareness and efforts by in-hospital child abuse center to identity and prevent child abuse by investigation of victim and types of injury caused by child abuse. METHODS: A retrospective study was performed with 51 patients who had been diagnosed or suspected as child abuse at Shiny kid child abuse center in Soonchunhyang Gumi Hospital from January 2008 to December 2011. The medical records, radiologic documents, and social worker's notes were reviewed to investigate age, sex, type of abuse, perpetrator, type of injury, final diagnosis, and follow-up success rate. RESULTS: The mean age of the subjects was 7 years old. Twenty-one patients were between 1 and 6 years old, 14 patients between 7 and 12 years old, 12 patients over 13 years old, and 4 cases less than 1 year old. The sex distribution was 47% (n=24) of male and 53% (n=27) of female. Thirty-five percentage of these patients reported with mixed abuse, 40% neglect, 29% physical abuse, 18% emotional abuse, 10.3% abandonment, and 2.5% sexual abuse, respectively. Twelve cases (23.5%) of them were found out the Routine health checkup. Bleeding and bruising (17.6%) were the second. Contusion and laceration were diagnosed in 9 cases, failure to thrive in 8 cases, tension headache in 5 cases, irritable bowel syndrome in 4 cases, sepsis of newborn in 4 cases, nephrotic syndrome in 3 cases, chronic otitis externa and media in 3 cases, mental retardation in 2 cases, congenital brain anomaly in 2 cases, major depression in 2 cases, pulmonary tuberculosis in 2 cases, diabetes mellitus in 1 case, and others in 6 cases, respectively. CONCLUSION: In-hospital child care team may experience the different proportion of abuse types and patterns by conducting a nation-wide survey of child abuse cases.