Heather Bottoms' two sons had been asking to go to a local indoor trampoline park for a while, so last September she took them. Her older son, then age 13, was jumping up and down when he bounced off the wall, fell and broke both the bones in one arm. The injury required surgery to insert two pins into his arm.
The number of trampoline-park injuries like this has soared, according to research published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. Using data from a government injury surveillance system, the study authors estimate that the number of ER visits from injuries incurred at an indoor park — typically a series of connected trampolines in a big room surrounded by padded or trampoline walls — rose from fewer than 600 in 2010 to 6,932 in 2014.
The International Association of Trampoline Parks notes, however, that there were an estimated 50 million North American visits in the past year to the parks, which are becoming increasingly popular.
Despite that, most injuries still occur on home trampolines, the use of which the American Academy of Pediatrics "strongly" discourages. And the overall number of annual ER visits for trampoline-related injuries held steady over the study period, averaging about 91,750.
"Our concern is that there are more serious trampoline injuries [at parks] than on home trampolines," says Kathryn Kasmire, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center and the University of Connecticut and an author of the study.