Review

That's the opinion of researchers here, who found that when the latest installments of the Harry Potter books came out, the number of kids showing up in the emergency room with broken bones, sprains, scrapes and bruises went down significantly.

Apparently, kids were just so wild about Harry that they didn't have time to ride a skateboard down a flight of stairs, or weave a scooter through heavy traffic.

"It may therefore be hypothesized that there is a place for a committee of safety conscious, talented writers who could produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention," wrote Stephen Gwilym, M.D., and colleagues in the department of Orthopaedic Trauma Surgery at the John Radcliffe Hospital here.

They published their magical findings in the Dec. 24-31 issue of the BMJ, the annual year-end issue when the normally staid journal lets its hair down with off-beat research, often tongue-in-cheek but legitimate nonetheless.

Although a coordinated effort to get kids reading can simultaneously keep them out of harm's way, enrich their minds and exercise their imaginations, there may be a risk-benefit tradeoff, the authors cautioned.

"Potential problems with this project would include an unpredictable increase in childhood obesity, rickets, and loss of cardiovascular fitness," they wrote.

The investigators conducted a retrospective review of all children ages seven to 15 who came to their emergency department with musculoskeletal injuries during the summer months over three years.

The purpose of the study was "to investigate the impact that Harry Potter books had on children's traumatic injuries during the peak of their use," the investigators wrote.

They compared the number of admissions on the weekends that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were released (at 12:01 a.m. on a Saturday) with the numbers from surrounding weekends and over the same dates in the previous year.

They used government-supplied meteorological data to determine weather conditions on the weekends in question to allow adjustments for climatic conditions that might dampen participation of kids in more hazardous outdoor activities.

They found that the mean attendance rate for children ages seven to 15 during control weekends was 67.4 (SD 10.4), but on the weekends that the books were released, the mean attendance rate was 36.5 (SD 0.7).

"This represents a significant decrease in attendances on the intervention weekends, as both are greater than two standard deviations from the mean control attendance rate and an unpaired t test gives a t value of 14.2 (P < 0.0001)," the authors wrote. "At no other point during the three year surveillance period was attendance that low"

There were no meteorological data to indicate that weather conditions could have played a confounding role, they added.

"Harry Potter books seem to protect children from traumatic injuries," Dr. Gwilym and colleagues wrote.

The authors did not report, however, whether there were fewer emergency department visits during the period surrounding the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (734 pages, Scholastic Books hardcover edition) than during the release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (435 pages).