Pediatric abusive head trauma-Recommended definitions for public health surveillance and research
Date
2012
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Abstract
The prevention of child maltreatment and the reduction of abusive injuries and their consequences is an
important priority area for CDC. As part of the public health approach in addressing child maltreatment, CDC
has launched an effort to develop uniform case definitions and data elements for use in surveillance of child
maltreatment and abusive head trauma. In 2008, CDC published Version 1.0 of Child Maltreatment Surveillance:
Uniform Definitions for Public Health and Recommended Data Elements (Leeb et al. 2008), which covers all
types of child maltreatment. The current report focuses on standard data elements for abusive head trauma—a
specific category of child maltreatment that presents unique definitional and measurement challenges. These
challenges are discussed followed by a presentation of recommended uniform operational definitions of fatal and
nonfatal abusive head trauma based on International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM for morbidity coding
and ICD-10 for mortality coding) diagnosis and external- cause-of-injury codes (2001; 2005). Similar processes
and formats to that of the Child Maltreatment Surveillance Uniform Definitions and Data Elements have been
used in order to maintain consistency and facilitate ease of use.
Description
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Article
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Keywords
abusive head trauma, child abuse, shaken baby syndrome, prevention, tracking, data
Citation
Parks, S. E., Annest, J. L., Hill, H. A., & Karch, D. L. (2012). Pediatric abusive head trauma-Recommended definitions for public health surveillance and research. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.