Dr. Al Hajj Sulley Ali-Gabass, a medical doctor at the Effia Nkwata Regional Hospital is cautioning the general public to desist from the practice of holding babies by the leg and shaking them since there is a syndrome attached to it.
In an interview with The Enquirer newspaper on Tuesday, Dr. Ali-Gabass said Shaking Baby Syndrome (SBS) is a form of child abuse that is diagnosed from a triad of symptoms, namely subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling.He said, in a majority of cases there is no visible sign of external trauma.
Dr. Ali-Gabass said infants and small children are especially vulnerable to SBS because their neck muscles are still too weak to adequately support their disproportionately large heads and their young brain tissue and blood vessels are extremely fragile.
�When an infant is vigorously shaken by legs, shoulders, or chest, the whiplash motion repeatedly jars the baby�s brain with tremendous force causing internal damage and bleeding,� he said.
He emphasized that, while there may be no obvious external signs of injury following the shaking, the child may suffer internally from bleeding in the brain and bruising (called subdural hemorrhage and hematoma); brain swelling and damage (called cerebral edema); mental retardation; blindness, hearing loss, paralysis, speech impairment, an learning disabilities and death.
According to him, there has been a controversy regarding the amount of force required to produce the brain damage seen in shaking baby syndrome. He added that biomechanical experiment in 2005 demonstrated that �forceful shaking can severely injure or kill an infant, this is because the cervical spine would be severely injured.
<<Print>>