Toddlers and other young children are less likely to be killed in a car crash if they ride in a booster seat or use some other type of child restraint system rather than just a seat belt, a new study found.
Dr Dennis R. Durbin, of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and his colleagues looked at national data representing nearly 965,000 children, aged two through six years, involved in two-way crashes from 1998 to 2003, in which the vehicle was left non-drivable.
About one of every 1,000 children died. Fewer than half (45 per cent) of all children were in rear- or forward-facing child car seats, booster seats or other child restraint systems, the investigators report in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
After taking the children's seating position into consideration as well as other factors, Dr Durbin and his team found that those in child restraint systems had a 21 per cent lower risk of dying than those who only used seat belts.
Furthermore, when cases in which the child restraint system or seat belts were seriously misused were excluded from the analysis, there was an even greater benefit of child restraints: a 28 per cent reduction in the risk of death in comparison to seat belts alone, the report indicates.
Seat belts are designed with "average-sized adults in mind" for optimal performance, Dr Durbin explained, likening a child's use of adult seat belts to the idea of getting a five-year-old child to wear adult-sized clothing.
"It's obvious that there's a problem," he said.