Hard data now available to confirm the connection
Hospitals admitted more abused kids with brain injuries as the U.S. economy started to struggle, according to a new study. Published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, the findings come from hospital data on children under age 5 from four states, Reuters reports. From 2004 to 2009, 422 kids were diagnosed with “abusive head trauma,” and 16 per cent of them died of their injuries. In the three years before the crash in December 2007, the rate of abusive head injuries was 8.9 per year per 100,000 kids. After the crash, that number climbed to 14.7 per 100,000.