Clinical trial NCT00727116: Pennsylvania Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program
Official title: Pennsylvania Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Injury
Traumatic Brain Injury
Child Abuse
Lead sponsor: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Sponsor class: FED
Collaborators: name: Pennsylvania Department of Health
name: American Academy of Pediatrics
First posted: 2008-08-01
Enrollment: 949609
Sex: ALL
Standard ages: CHILD
ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: NON_RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: PREVENTION

Brief summary: This project is designed to evaluate a statewide, hospital-based parent education program to prevent abusive head trauma (AHT) in Pennsylvania, and investigate the additional effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of "booster" sessions of parent education delivered to parents at primary care provider offices in central Pennsylvania.

Specific Aims:

1. Assess the effectiveness of an established statewide program of hospital-based postnatal parent education about violent infant shaking, provided at a single consistent point in time between the infant's birth and hospital discharge, in reducing the incidence of AHT.
2. Identify which component(s) are the most important mediators of the intervention's effectiveness; determine whether the intervention effect is more directly related to changes in perpetrator or caregiver behavior; and determine the effectiveness of the intervention among various socioeconomic groups.
3. Determine the cost effectiveness of the hospital-based program.
4. Establish the feasibility, additional costs, and effectiveness of a combined program of repeated exposure delivered both post-natally in the hospital and during follow up 2-, 4- and 6-month outpatient health maintenance visits with the pediatric care provider.

Detailed description: Upon the birth of the child, all parents (mothers, and whenever possible, fathers or father figures) will be asked to read written materials and view an 8-minute video on the dangers of violent infant shaking. Parents will be asked to voluntarily sign a commitment statement affirming their receipt and understanding of the materials; these commitment statements will be sent to the Principal Investigator. A random subset of parent participants will be asked to voluntarily answer a short questionnaire about their impressions of the materials. In addition, 31 counties in central Pennsylvania will be randomly divided into two groups. In 15 counties, the hospital-based intervention will remain as described above. In the other 16 counties, all primary care providers having offices in those counties will be asked to provide all parents of newborns at the 2-, 4-, and 6-month immunization visits another set of written materials about violent infant shaking and voluntarily sign a response form that they read and understood the materials. Participating parents in this group will also be asked if they would be willing to complete a short telephone survey when the infant is 7 months old (and if so, asked to provide a telephone number). The telephone survey asks questions about the intervention materials and parents' perception of the information, and seeks to determine the mediators of a program effect. An invitation letter will be sent to a control group of parents who do not receive the office-based intervention to ask if they would be willing to complete the short telephone survey when their infant is 7 months old.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Parents giving birth in a PA hospital

Primary outcomes:
measure: Incidence of abusive head trauma in infants
timeFrame: 3 years
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
Study officials:
affiliation: Penn State University Hershey Medical Center
name: Mark Dias, MD, FAAP
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Dias MS, Smith K, DeGuehery K, Mazur P, Li V, Shaffer ML. Preventing abusive head trauma among infants and young children: a hospital-based, parent education program. Pediatrics. 2005 Apr;115(4):e470-7. doi: 10.1542/peds.2004-1896.