Violent head trauma in infants, or the shaken baby syndrome: pediatric aspects

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem unfamiliar to medicians, lawyers and forensic doctors - «the shaken baby syndrome». Today this condition is called «violent head trauma». Violent head trauma in newborns is a variant of the child abuse syndrome and is associated with high mortality and impaired child development not only in early age, but also in later life, it affects the quality of life of children and their families. The social and psychological causes of violence against infants, the mechanisms of trauma received in the framework of the likelihood of child abuse are described. An integrated management according to the established degree of probability of child abuse is proposed. Particular attention is paid to modern diagnostic methods in the article. With violent head trauma in infants, as a rule, there are no signs of external trauma, and the clinical symptoms are characterized by wide variability. That is why the main diagnostic methods are neuroimaging (computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, neurosonography), x-ray examination of the skeleton, examination by an ophthalmologist. The diagnosis is established by the presence of classic symptoms of shaken infants: subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhages, bilateral retinal hemorrhage, diffuse brain damage. An assessment of the probability of violent head trauma as a cause of acute intracranial trauma in infants is presented. No conflict of interests was declared by the authors. Key words: violent head trauma, diagnosis, infants.