[An epidemiological study of the adolescent nonfatal unintentional injuries in Taiwan]

In Taiwan, the unintentional injury is the major cause of morbidity, mortality, and school absenteeism among adolescents. This problem has been ignored in past years, so this investigation was undertaken to alert public, school, and parental attention and concern, to establish the baseline data for adolescent unintentional injuries, and to provide information and guidance for adolescent injury prevention and control programs. Two thousand-three hundred and seventeen students were randomly sampled from 1,115 junior high, senior high, and vocational schools in Taiwan during the 1994-1995 academic year through a multi-stage stratified cluster random sampling with probabilities proportional to sizes. The data were collected via the self-reported adolescent unintentional injury records, and analyzed with frequency distribution, Pearson's Chi-square statistics, and product-moment correlation coefficient. It was found that an overall injury rate (per season) was 56.37% (1292/2292). The rates were higher for boys than girls, for junior high students than senior high or vocational students, for those being near-sighted, for those having a history of previous injuries, and for younger students. Abrasions, sprains, bumps, cuts, and falls were the five most common injuries among adolescents, and mostly appeared in upper and lower extremities. Most injuries took place in athletic fields, classrooms, campus, stairways and corridors at school, mainly due to self, others of carelessness, and sports.