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Abusive Head Trauma Research Paper

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Abusive head trauma (AHT), also called shaken baby syndrome, is a traumatic brain injury to a child as a result of child abuse. Shaking as well as throwing a baby constitutes AHT. When a caretaker forcefully shakes a baby, his or her head muscles will rotate in a circular motion as their head whips back and forth. Impact is especially damaging because the fast acceleration and deceleration is very dangerous and causes blood vessels to rupture, tearing in the brain, and bleeding of the brain. AHT is the most common cause of traumatic brain injury in infants. Around 25% of victims die from AHT. Infants are at a high risk of AHT due to their large head size relative to the rest of their body and their inability to support their head with their …show more content…
Common triggers of AHT include crying, toilet training issues, interrupting, and feeding issues. Often times, the baby will stop crying after being shaken because his or her brain is not receiving enough oxygen and consequently the baby falls asleep. This is considered a hypoxic-ischemic brain injury when the brain experiences a decrease of oxygen that is dangerous (hypoxia) and a diminished blood supply (ischemia). Long-term effects of AHT include brain damage, learning difficulties, learning behavioral problems, seizures, deafness, cerebral palsy, and permanent vegetative state. Boys are more frequently victims of AHT than girls. Other risk factors are those of a lower socioeconomic class and boyfriends of the mother living in the home. Around 70% of the time the perpetrator is a male. Identifying abusive head trauma is a very meticulous process. Mechanisms behind an injury must be carefully understood in order to screen the differences between accidental trauma and …show more content…
The majority of axonal injuries, brain damage that is brought on by shearing and causes lesions and brain swelling characteristic of AHT, have been determined to be hypoxic-ischemic in nature rather than traumatic. Thus, more attention has been directed on identifying spinal injuries in AHT. Prior to this discovery, spinal injuries were rarely reported in conjunction with AHT cases, mainly because no one ever looked for them. Autopsy protocol prior to 2000 removed the brain and severed the spinal cord. Since then, the protocol was changed and the spinal cord is now removed with the brain. Spinal injuries have now been identified in 70% of abusive head trauma cases that ended in fatality. In this paper, research was conducted to study the spine in AHT victims in order to discover the prevalence of spinal injuries in AHT compared to accidental and nontraumatic groups. The entire study included a total of 183 children under the age of 48 months who had spinal MRIs sometime between 2000 and 2012. Radiographical and clinical findings were collected and analyzed for traumatic spinal injuries. Between the three groups the incidence, distribution, and radiological characteristics of bone, ligamentous injuries, and soft-tissue injuries of the spine

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