These coding inaccuracies could distort our understanding of gun violence in the United States and make it seem like accidental shootings are more common than they really are, researchers reported in JAMA Network Open.
“The systematic error in intent classification is not widely known or acknowledged by researchers in this field,” Philip J. Cook, PhD, of Duke University, Durham, N.C., and Susan T. Parker, of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wrote in an invited commentary about the new findings. “The bulk of all shootings, nonfatal and fatal together, are assaults, which is to say the result of one person intentionally shooting another. An accurate statistical portrait thus suggests that gun violence is predominantly a crime problem.”
In 2020, 79% of all homicides and 53% of all suicides involved firearms, the CDC reported. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children in the United States, government data show.
For the new study, Matthew Miller, MD, ScD, of Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center in Boston, and his colleagues examined how International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes may misclassify the intent behind gunshot injuries.
Dr. Miller’s group looked at 1,227 incidents between 2008 and 2019 at three major trauma centers – Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, both in Boston, and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
Of those shootings, 837 (68.2%) involved assaults, 168 (13.5%) were unintentional, 124 (9.9%) were deliberate self-harm, and 43 (3.4%) were instances of legal intervention, based on the researchers’ review of medical records.
ICD codes at discharge, however, labeled 581 cases (47.4%) as assaults and 432 (35.2%) as unintentional.
The researchers found that 234 of the 837 assaults (28%) and 9 of the 43 legal interventions (20.9%) were miscoded as unintentional. This problem occurred even when the “medical narrative explicitly indicated that the shooting was an act of interpersonal violence,” such as a drive-by shooting or an act of domestic violence, the researchers reported.
Hospital trauma registrars, who detail the circumstances surrounding injuries, were mostly in agreement with the researchers.
Medical coders “would likely have little trouble characterizing firearm injury intent accurately if incentives were created for them to do so,” the authors wrote.
Trends and interventions
Separately, researchers published studies showing that gun violence tends to affect various demographics differently, and that remediating abandoned houses could help reduce gun crime.
Lindsay Young, of the University of Cincinnati, and Henry Xiang, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, analyzed rates of firearm deaths from 1981 to 2020.
They found that the rate of firearm-related homicide was five times higher among males than females, and the rate of suicide involving firearms was nearly seven times higher for men, they reported in PLOS ONE.
Black men were the group most affected by homicide, whereas White men were most affected by suicide, they found.
To see if fixing abandoned properties would improve health and reduce gun violence in low-income, Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Eugenia C. South, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and colleagues conducted a randomized trial.
They randomly assigned abandoned properties in some areas to undergo full remediation (installing working windows and doors, cleaning trash, and weeding); trash cleanup and weeding only; or no intervention.
“Abandoned houses that were remediated showed substantial drops in nearby weapons violations (−8.43%), gun assaults (−13.12%), and to a lesser extent shootings (−6.96%),” the researchers reported.
The intervention targets effects of segregation that have resulted from “historical and ongoing government and private-sector policies” that lead to disinvestment in Black, urban communities, they wrote. Abandoned houses can be used to store firearms and for other illegal activity. They also can engender feelings of fear, neglect, and stress in communities, the researchers noted.
Dr. Miller’s study was funded by the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research; coauthors disclosed corporate, government, and university grants. The full list of disclosures can be found with the original article. Editorialists Dr. Cook and Dr. Parker report no relevant financial relationships. Dr. South’s study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. South and some coauthors disclosed government grants.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.