A lot of childhood injuries are basically temporary, but I wondered how worried I should be about kids permanently injuring their eyes.
This study is great. It’s one year of data from all of Scotland. They break down all the children in the country age 14 and under who got treatment for an eye injury during that year.
How common are serious eye injuries?
93 children were hospitalized for an eye injury. That’s 8.85 in 100,000 of this age group, or about 1 in 11,300.
After treatment one child was considered “visually impaired” in one eye, and one child was considered “blind” in one eye. No children lost sight in both eyes. So the rate of any kind of lost vision was 1 child in 525,423, or 0.19 in 100,000.
Who gets eye injuries?
70% of the patients were boys.
16% were aged 4 or under.
The rate for children was only slightly higher than that of the overall population.
What causes eye injuries in children?
Blunt trauma was the most common injury type rather than penetration, foreign bodies, or chemical burns.
“Most of the younger age group were injured by toys or domestic utensils which are found in any home.” In older children, sports is the most common cause. Chemical injuries are more likely to injure both eyes.
Limitations
Possibly some Scottish children got care in other countries, but I’m guessing not many since you’d presumably want to get treatment right away rather than traveling a long distance.
This might not generalize to countries where children’s activities are different, or where children have less access to treatment.
The study was published in 1999 and they note that eye injuries had been declining due to things like more seatbelt use and restrictions on fireworks. Possibly they’ve changed since then, but I wouldn’t expect big changes.
Anecdote
My two-year-old was playing with her cousin of the same age, who whacked her in the face with a book. She got a scratch on the surface of her eye, and a pediatrician gave us some antibiotic ointment to reduce the risk of it getting infected. She has no lasting effects. As the study says, “although all injuries are, in theory, preventible this may not be easy in the preschool age group.”