Shaken baby syndrome: what is it?
In infants, the neck muscles are not sufficiently toned to support the head, which still weighs relatively heavily compared to the rest of the body. When a toddler is shaken, his head therefore swings relatively violently back and forth.
Also, unlike the adult brain, a baby’s brain does not completely fill its cranium. Sudden oscillations of the head can cause the brain to move back and forth, which then hits the walls of the skull, with often serious neurological consequences for the child: quadriplegia, blindness, epilepsy, mental retardation … Only one in four children ’emerges without sequelae.
Signs and symptoms of a “shaken baby”
Infants who have been shaken may have different symptoms: from irritability or lethargy to vomiting, seizures, or loss of consciousness with stopping breathing, which can lead to death.
Sometimes, in shaken babies, an isolated and gradual acceleration of the growth of the cranial perimeter is noticed.
Too many shaken babies!
Figures
The Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital, in Paris, estimates that between 1996 and 2000, its neurosurgery department received 230 infants with shaken baby syndrome. According to statistics from this establishment, one in ten cases of shaken babies is fatal.
In France, dozens of children under the age of 2 (most of them under 12 months) die each year from being too brutally shaken by their parents in France. It would be wrong to think that this phenomenon, known as “shaken baby syndrome”, is not only the result of intentional mistreatment. Without thinking wrong, some parents who handle infants too roughly can cause the same phenomenon.