Brief CommunicationsShaken baby syndrome: report on four pairs of twins
Introduction
SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME is a serious type of physical abuse, mainly involving children younger than 6 months of age. Since first described by Caffey (1972) and Guthkelch (1971) an, increasing numbers of publications discuss the pathogenesis, clinical findings, variability, and poor outcome.
Educational efforts to increase pediatricians vigilance, or a higher general incidence are the reasons that we more frequently do not overlook shaken infants. Yet even today, exact epidemiological data, especially incidence rates, do not exist. In our hospital, the incidence of Shaken Baby Syndrome is on the rise. We now have started a statistical evaluation and would like to describe a striking detail of our present investigation: within 11 months four pairs of twins were treated who suffered from Shaken Baby Syndrome. From these, five children were severely affected and two died. In one family, both of the twins repeatedly suffered injury from being shaken.
We believe that our actual clinical observation deserves general attention. As long as we do not have the results of prospective investigations and our population sample is small, it is premature to generalize our findings. At present we speculate that twins are at higher risk to suffer from Shaken Baby Syndrome, and we want to discuss this as a risk-factor on which we should focus our prevention efforts.
Section snippets
Case report (table 1)
Discussion
The treatment of four pairs of twins with Shaken Baby Syndrome within the period of only 1 year prompts us to inform the medical community.
Although we lack exact statistic evaluation at the moment, it may be possible that Shaken Baby Syndrome in twins is above average. During the same time we saw a total number of approximately eight shaken babies. In all these cases diagnosis was clearly defined according to the pathognomonic combination of retinal hemorrhages and subdural hematoma Budenz et
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