Child abuse & neglect
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To compare the cases of child abuse (CA) with other admissions in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) for differences in patient-specific health care costs, severity of illness (SI) and mortality, and describe their outcome. ⋯ These results confirm that interventional medical care in response to severe CA is very costly and the ultimate outcome is significantly worse than other diseases. Therefore, we believe it is imperative to allocate resources to prevention.