24-hour, weekly, and annual patterns in traumatic and non-traumatic surgical pediatric emergencies.

24 h patterns with high frequency components in the incidence of pediatric trauma were validated and quantified in one of our earlier studies. Herein, we further explored the temporal--high frequency, 24 h, weekly (7d), hemi-weekly (3.5d), and annual--patterns in traumatic (1990-1997; n = 15,110 events) and non-traumatic pediatric surgical emergencies (PSE) (1992-2001; n = 5,593 events) as well as automobile accidents (AA) (1990-1997; n = 67,712) in the County of Vaud, Switzerland.