Operation overload: Kids’ backpacks
By Nathan Seppa
At least once a week, more than a third of middle-school children carry loads on their backs in excess of 30 percent of their body weight, Italian researchers report in the Dec. 4, 1999 Lancet.
A study of 237 sixth-graders in Bresso, near Milan, found an average backpack load of 20 pounds, which equaled 22 percent of the body weight of the children carrying it, says study coauthor Stefano Negrini, a rehabilitation specialist at the Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation Hospital in Milan.