A study revealed last week in New Scientist has discovered that even a mild shaking may be enough for babies to suffer fatal brain damage from unsupported movement of the child's head.
The finding is the result of a two-year project on head injuries in young children, funded by the medical charity Action Research and led by Dr Jennian Geddes at the Royal London Hospital. It calls into question the conventional belief that it takes violent force to injure a baby. However, the researchers stressed that everyday activities such as a parent or carer bouncing a baby on their knee would not cause such injuries in an infant.
The researchers studied the post-mortems of 53 children believed to have died from being violently shaken. Of the 37 who were under a year old, only two had this type of injury and it was found that three-quarters of the babies had died because they had stopped breathing.
They found damage at the junction where the brain meets the spinal cord, which they said can happen if a baby's head is unsupported and allowed to flop backwards and forwards. Then the lower brain stem and spinal cord, where the head joins the neck and where breathing is controlled, would be stretched excessively, leading to potentially fatal breathing problems.
Dr Geddes said, 'We have found a type of damage, not previously reported, which would suggest that in a proportion of cases the brain is stretched where it joins the spinal cord, at the top of the neck. This, together with our finding that these children do not usually have any evidence of damage elsewhere in the brain, suggests that violent shaking may not be necessary to cause a fatal injury in a baby.'
She added, 'It is generally believed shaken babies always suffer a severe form of brain damage known as DAI (Diffuse Axonal Injury). Our own impression was the contrary, and our study confirmed that DAI is a rarity in non-accidental injuries.'
Rioch Edwards-Brown, director of The Five Percenters, which she and her husband founded three years ago after they were wrongly accused of shaking their baby, said, 'We're happy to see this new research and hope it leads to a review of some cases where people have been convicted. We know of cases where parents have shaken a child who was having choking or breathing problems - called non-malicious shaking - but been imprisoned.' The full research paper will be published in the July issue of the neurology journal Brain.
