by Claudia Boyd-Barrett posted in Parenting

You've probably heard in the news about alarming incidents of hoverboards catching fire. But a new study indicates the biggest danger from these devices is falls.
Almost 27,000 kids and teens ended up in the emergency room because of hoverboard-related injuries in 2015 and 2016, the first two years the toys went on the market in the United States, according to the study published in Pediatrics.
Only 2 of these injuries involved burns, and not because the hoverboards caught fire (2 kids on hoverboards crashed into a stove with boiling water, another girl got a friction burn after a hoverboard ran over her finger).
Instead, kids and teens falling off the hoverboards accounted for almost all of the injuries, the researchers found when analyzing information from a national database on emergency room visits. The most common injuries were to the wrist, followed by forearms and the head. More than 1 in 4 kids hospitalized suffered head injuries, the study found. About half of patients had fractures. Bruises and sprains or strains were also common.

That's not to say the fire risk from hoverboards isn't real. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says it's aware of more than 250 hoverboard incidents related to fires or overheating since 2015.
To reduce the risk of this happening, the CPSC recommends making sure your hoverboard is compliant with the UL2272 safety standard. Also, check www.CPSC.gov to see whether your hoverboa...