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Every year, 1 in 20 Australian children will be reported to child protection.

One in 50 children will be the subject of an investigation by authorities and 1 in 100 will have that report substantiated.

Almost 1 in 100 will live in out-of-home care.

Professor Leonie Segal, chair of health economics and social policy at the University of South Australia and her colleagues used linked data to study more than 620,000 people born in South Australia between 1986 and 2017.

They found children who came to the attention of child protection services were three times as likely to die before they turned 16 than those who did not.

And if surviving to age 16 years, they were more than twice as likely to die in early adulthood, (before 34 years of age) with particularly high death rates from self-harm and substance abuse, but also from natural causes.

Children known to child protection were much more likely to end up in the emergency department or be admitted to hospital.

These additional hospital visits alone cost the South Australian public hospital system more than $120 million a year.

Professor Segal says there is no way the research could have been done without data linkage.

She argues, with evidence we can change life trajectories, but without extra resourcing to therapeutically address childhood trauma nothing will change.