No one likes to think about his or her child being in the hospital. And yet, it’s strangely fascinating to get deep in the numbers that paint a picture of healthcare for children in the U.S.—especially if you’re a layperson with access to statistics usually at the disposal of researchers and policy makers.

This month, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality released the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project’s Kids’ Inpatient Sample (or KID). The KID, which is the only dataset that studies hospital use, outcomes and charges surrounding patients who are under age 21, started in 1997 and is released every three years; this release features data from 2006.

The data comes from 3,739 hospitals in 38 states, including young patients covered by Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance and the uninsured. KID data can help researchers keep an eye on national trends and study topics like uncommon conditions and economic burdens of particular conditions.

It costs $200 to purchase KID, but you can also see some national estimates from the KID here. At that website, you can identify yourself as either a layperson or medical professional (if you select the second option, it is apparently helpful to be familiar with an ICD-9-CM coding manual.)

As a layperson, you can look up information on specific diagnoses/conditions and surgeries/procedures, or general information on all stays in U.S. hospitals. You can also check out the rank order of specific diagnoses/conditions and surgeries/procedures—which is what I did.

I looked up the top 10 rankings by number of discharges (which is not the same thing as number of patients—a person who is discharged from a hospital multiples times a year will be counted each time as a separate discharge). For children less than a year old, the principal diagnosis was not surprising: it was simply being a newborn infant (4,105,017 discharges), followed by acute bronchitis (105,535 discharges). Asthma and pneumonia are the top diagnosis categories for children 1-9 years of age, but then it gets interesting: by age 10, the second largest category is affective mood disorders (that’s depression and bipolar disorder—28,658 discharges), right after appendicitis. For children aged 15-17 years, affective mood disorders is the top category (38,746 discharges).

Proponents of teen abstinence may be unhappy with the results for that oldest age group. After affective mood disorder, the second ranked category is maternal complications of birth and the period after birth (31,864 discharges); the third is trauma to vulva and perineum (30,292 discharges). Skip past appendicitis, and we’re back to other complications of pregnancy (21,580 discharges), other mental conditions (15,046 discharges), normal pregnancy and/or delivery (12,347 discharges), and early or threatened labor (11,737 discharges).

Surely these numbers will give a well-rounded look at health issues surrounding children and very young adults—and hopefully, policy makers, researchers and parents will respond.