Are seat belt restraints as effective in school age children as in adults?
Despite standard seatbelts being designed for adults, they protect school age children at least as well as adults, finds a study in this weeks BMJ. Researchers at ten crash investigation centres in Canada identified 470 children aged 4-14 years and 1,301 adults to study the effectiveness of standard seat belts for protecting school age children in road vehicle crashes. Overall, 40% of children were unbelted, and 22% of children travelling with belted adults were unbelted. The odds of sustaining fatal or moderately severe injury for children in the front passenger seat was more than nine times higher for unbelted children than for belted ones, and for those in the rear left seat was more than two times higher for unbelted than for belted children. These results consistently show that school age children involved in motor vehicle crashes were less severely injured if they were wearing a seat belt, say the authors. Previous research has provided mixed results on the effectiveness of seat
Related Questions
- Should drivers and front seat passengers, including small adults and children 13 years of age and older, adjust the seat in a particular way to get maximum effectiveness from Airbags?
- Are seat belt restraints as effective in school age children as in adults?
- Are children 4 to 8 years of age big enough to use the adult seat belt?
