NEW YORK, Jan. 04, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- New York plastic surgeon Dr. Kaveh Alizadeh received the award for 2018 best published paper in North America at the annual international meeting of Plastic Surgery held in September 2018 in Chicago. Dr. Alizadeh led the research team that studied the outcomes of children with dog bites and how they can best be managed. The paper, titled “An Algorithmic Approach to Operative Management of Complex Pediatric Dog Bites: 3-Year Review of a Level I Regional Referral Pediatric Trauma Hospital,” was recognized as the “Best North American Paper.”

To determine the most award-worthy publications, members of the publishing and editorial staff at Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery^®, affiliated with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, reviewed data associated with all of the articles published in 2017. By assessing the total number of views (both of the full text of the article and of PDFs), as well as taking into account the number of times an article was shared by email or added to a reader’s personal collection, the team developed a ranking that assigned each article a score.

Winners were announced in numerous categories, including gold, silver, bronze, and honorable mention in “Best International Collaboration” and “Best Case Report,” as well as “Best Paper” in the African, Asian, European, Latin American, Middle East, Oceanic, and Southeast Asian regions. No author was allowed to earn two wins, even for different papers.

Dr. Alizadeh’s paper, the top North American winner, involved reviewing the January 2012 to December 2014 emergency room records from a large-level 1 pediatric trauma center, recording and analyzing any information about children who had come in after sustaining a dog bite.

The research revealed that a total of 108 patients fit the criteria, with ages ranging from 18 years down to 5 months. Other notable facts: Preschoolers made up the largest percentage of dog bite victims in the pediatric demographic, children who needed operative repair tended to be younger than those whose wounds could be handled primary closure in the ER, and injuries were most commonly localized on the head and neck.

Dr. Alizadeh’s ultimate conclusion was that young dog bite victims whose injuries came from large animals require more immediate care in level 1 pediatric hospitals. The intention is to efficiently direct them to the optimal course for hospitalization and maximize their eventual outcome.

According to the study, there are more than 4.5 million reported dog bites in the United States each year. These injuries have accounted for just 4 percent of all pediatric emergency visits, but 40 percent of all pediatric traumas.

As a New York-based plastic surgeon, Dr. Alizadeh performs both reconstructive and cosmetic surgeries. He founded Alizadeh Cosmoplastic Surgery and is chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Westchester Medical Center, associate professor of clinical surgery at New York Medical College, president of the New York Regional Society of Plastic Surgeons, and founder of Mission: Restore, a humanitarian group dedicated to providing surgical care in the developing world and training doctors there to do the same.

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