Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 4, 1991 TAG: 9103030011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jane E. Brody
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Yet it is the rare child who reaches adulthood without at least one head injury.
Infants and toddlers fall on their heads; older children hurt their heads during activities like biking or skating, and children of any age may suffer head injuries in motor vehicle accidents.
Thousands of others are deliberately injured by abusive parents who strike or shake them hard enough to bruise the brain.
According to national health statistics, each year 375,000 American children and adolescents suffer head injuries that necessitate medical attention or restricted activity.
Like jello in a bowl, the brain is a soft, delicate tissue housed in a hard container, the skull.
Though the skull usually protects the brain against assault, when the skull is struck hard, the brain can bang against the bony skull or slosh about enough to tear vital nerve fibers, causing serious and sometimes permanent damage.
Thus, child abuse involving shaking or direct blows is one of the leading causes of childhood brain damage.
Another common cause of non-impact brain injury is whiplash, suffered in motor vehicle accidents.
Fortunately, the young brain is resilient and most children who suffer head injuries recover without any apparent ill effects.
Each year about 200,000 children with head injuries are hospitalized for evaluation, but evidence of brain damage is found in only 5 to 10 percent of them.
Only 6 of every 200 reported cases of head injuries are severe, involving a loss of consciousness for more than 20 minutes, said Dr. Peggy Wisdom, a neurologist at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, while 14 are moderate, with a loss of consciousness for 5 to 20 minutes, and the rest are mild, with either no loss of consciousness or a loss of less than 5 minutes,
Last fall in the journal Pediatrics, researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and from Bristol, England, described the long-term aftermath of mild head injuries in 114 British children.
The youngsters were compared with more than a thousand uninjured children and with 600 children with other types of injuries.
The children who had suffered head injuries were all diagnosed as having sustained a concussion, suffering one or more symptoms that included brief loss of consciousness, vomiting, amnesia, drowsiness, headache, dizziness and nausea.
The children were re-examined one to five years later, and those who had suffered head injuries did not differ from uninjured children except that teachers were more likely to rate the head-injured children as hyperactive.
by CNB