Shaken Infant Syndrome Essay

Imagine yourself as a sweet, innocent, precious little baby. You are totally dependant upon adults to give you what you need and most importantly love. Your only means of communication is crying so you cry when you need to be fed, when you need your diaper changed, when you aren’t feeling so well, or when you just want some attention. You are crying and someone comes over to you. They pick you up, but instead of holding you and comforting you, talking affectionately to you, they shake you violently and vigorously. You are a baby, imagine the fear and pain that the shaking causes you. This is a form of child abuse and what is even harder to believe is that it actually happens. The correct term is Shaken Baby Syndrome

Subdural or Epidural bleeding – as bleeding grows it pushes on brain which will mean you have difficulty communicating and moving.

Extradural hematoma (Epidural hematoma): “Bleeding between the dura mater and the skull caused most commonly by motor vehicle accidents and occasionally by falls and sporting accidents”(McCance & Huether, 2014, p. 584). It usually results from a “brief linear contact force to the calvaria that cause separation of the periosteal dura from bone and disruption of interposed vessels due

A Computed Tomography (CT) can be used to inspect large hemorrhages, that could be surgically excised, but in case of small hemorrhages, it is insensitive. Small hemorrhages could be early contusions or diffuse axon injury (DAI). SWI comes handy in determining such small hemorrhages and intracranial microhemmorhages. It is a high-resolution, fully velocity compensated, 3-dimensional gradient echo imaging sequence that is extremely sensitive to blood products in hemorrhage and deoxyhemoglobin in venous blood. Normally, CT and MRI would spot traumatic hemorrhagic lesions in cortical gray matter (GM), sub cortical white matter (WM), major white matter tracts, including corpus callosum and internal capsule, brainstem and in the ventricles. SWI helps in localizing microhemmorhages lesions at GM/WM junction. The research paper explores about a comparison of SWI and a conventional GRE performed by Tong et al. The outcome of it was a difference in lesion counts, which was highest in the brainstem/cerebellum and corpus callosum, while, lowest in the frontal & parietal-temporal-occipital GM/WM. The research article also reviews a study by Wu et al about patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) using CT and SWI. The

Statistics show that over half of infant deaths related to child abuse is caused by abusive head trauma or shaken baby syndrome. The effects of shaking a baby are serious and may lead to the death of an infant, studies show that an estimated amount of children who suffer from this is about 1,000 - 3,000 infants and toddlers. Every day one in four victims of SBS die from this abuse and 80% of the survivors suffer from permanent damages. Shaken baby syndrome or SBS has been around for hundreds of years, it happens when someone shakes an infant out of anger or frustration, this normally happens when the infant won’t stop crying. Infants have small brains and very weak neck muscles so when you shake a baby, you are making the brain bounce back and forth, hitting the interior of the skull causing either bruising, bleeding, swelling or all of the above to the brain.

It is also unclear if it is the brain injury itself that causes the result and if it is the same for healthy people.

An occlusive stroke can also convert into a hemorrhagic stroke if the stress on the vessel wall is great enough to cause it to rupture which then causes bleeding directly into the brain tissue. Hemorrhagic strokes are the second major classification of strokes with two distinct subgroups. Intracerebral hemorrhages describe the bleeding in to the brain tissue that generally results from severe and/or sustained hypertension. The elevated blood pressure causes changes in and weakens the arterial wall making its ability to rupture easier. Damage from this type of stroke occurs from the bleeding, which causes edema, distortion, and displacement, common irritants to the brain.

During infancy, the consistency of the brain tissue is similar to that of custard, making it extremely vulnerable to blows, jars, and other abrupt motions. In SBS and other pediatric brain injuries, several injuries may occur as a result of these motions. Cerebral hemorrhaging is evident in SBS. As blood collects where the brain has been damaged, there is compression or distortion of the remaining structures of the brain, which increases the risk for loss of blood flow to those structures. SBS may also result in brain bruising in multiple areas. These injuries involve speed of the shaking or high impact, which results in the brain bouncing against both sides of the skull, producing multifocal deficits. SBS cases range from mild to extremely

Subdural hematoma is a situation in which brain blood vessels and outermost membrane rupture. Blood leaks because of this, which causes compression of brain tissues. Chronic subdural hematoma may follow mild traumatic brain injury. Any minor or major injury to the brain can have shattering consequences for the patient. The Subdural hematoma may be caused by head injury or by a procedure like a lumbar puncture. This can be identified by the location and size of the injury, time spent after injury. The medical and neurological condition of the patient determine the treatment and can influence the results (Kim & Sim, 2015).

Symptoms of an intracerebral hemorrhage normally begin with sudden headache, often during increased amounts of activity. Loss of consciousness is also a common symptom, often within a few minutes or even seconds. Nausea, vomiting, delirium, and focal or generalized seizures are also common. Neurologic deterioration is usually sudden and progressive. Large hemorrhages, when located in the hemispheres, cause hemiparesis, which is the weakening of an entire side of the body; when located in the posterior fossa of the brain, they cause cerebellar or brain stem deficits such as pinpoint pupils, stertorous breathing, conjugate eye deviation or ophthalmoplegia, and even a coma. Large hemorrhages have proven to be fatal within only a few days in the

First, as soon as a subarachnoid hemorrhage occurs, there are many dangers to consider. While a brain aneurysm may not have any symptoms, an SAH does and they are unfortunately very sudden. Since an SAH is bleeding from the arteries, the rupture causes abrupt bleeding. From The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, Ms. Julia Barrett describes that the immediate danger caused by subarachnoid hemorrhages would be ischemia. She states, “Ischemia refers to tissue damage caused by restricted or blocked blood flow. The areas of the brain that do not receive adequate blood and oxygen can suffer irreparable injury, leading to permanent brain damage or death,” thus agreeing that danger is present from the very start with subarachnoid hemorrhages (Barrett). The rapid bleeding outside of the brain

Introduction: A subarachnoid hemorrhage is a leakage of blood into the subarachnoid space. This area is located between the pia matter and arachnoid matter. Cerebral spinal fluid is usually found in this in this space. The Cerebral spinal fluid acts as a shock absorber for any trauma or blow to the head. Sometimes the force is to big and blood is released into this area. This damages the lining of the brain which increases pressure to the brain and killing brain cells.

Hemorrhages into the brain occur unexpectedly and are often lethal events. Typical warning signs are not known; rarely a feeling of unsteadiness, dizziness or a tingling sensation can precede an intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), but such symptoms do not have localizing value such as in ischemia, where stroke-like warning signs (transient attacks) can occur days or weeks before the onset of a stroke. Often enough only a history of elevated blood pressure is known. Thus, for most patients, it comes “out of the blue”. The volume of the hemorrhage into the brain is the most decisive prognostic component and when reaching a total volume (such as more than 60 ml within one cerebral hemisphere) that cannot be compensated by intracranial compartmental

Subdural hematoma usually occurs after an injury to the head resulting from a fall or from an accident.

Complications of a subarachnoid hemorrhage include stroke, seizures, repeated re-bleeding after hemorrhage has healed itself, coma, paralysis, temporary or permanent impaired mental functioning and/ or memory loss, and death from repeated bleeds (Lewis et al., 2014). The only complications the patient has experienced as a result of sustaining a subarachnoid is multiple seizures as well as impaired mental functioning.