Brain Lesions From Blunt Trauma in Early Infancy

Although fatal cranial injuries in young infants are infrequent, periodically they come to the attention of the Medical Examiner. Most of these injuries occur when infants are accidentally dropped, but some of them result from beating or being thrown to the floor by irresponsible parents or by jealous or careless young siblings. In a recent issue of the Archives of Pathology, Lindenberg and Freytag¹ report their findings in a series of blunt cranial trauma in young infants.

They find that traumatic lesions in the brains of infants are quite different from those in the adult brain. While in the adult brain traumatic lesions consist mainly of contusion hemorrhages and necroses,² the lesions in the infantile brains are represented by tears in the white matter characteristically located in the first frontal convolutions and in orbital and temporal lobes sometimes extending into the lateral ventricles. In the mature brain a