Permanently Damaged: Long-Term Follow-Up of Shaken Babies

Shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a term denoting a particularly harmful form of child abuse. By definition, 1 these infants have intracranial and retinal hemorrhages in the absence of signs of head trauma or skull fracture. Most SBS victims appear to have significant neurologic damage at the time of diagnosis. 2,3 The medical literature, however, does not describe these children as they grow older. A 1986 article 4 called for follow-up studies on these children, but a computerized literature search turned up only one paper on long-term follow-up in SBS. Sinal and Ball 5 described cranial computerized tomog-raphic (CT) and clinical follow-up in 24 brain-injured children, 17 of whom had SBS. They followed the 15 surviving shaken infants for about 4 years: seven had severe handicaps, and only one was normal.