Researchers question shaken-baby syndrome diagnosis
In the 1960s, neurosurgeon Dr. Ayub Ommaya anesthetized rhesus monkeys, secured them in a contoured chair and then accelerated them along a 20-foot track until they crashed into a wall.
The experiments, supported in part by the U.S. Navy, led Ommaya to conclude whiplash, resulting from rapid acceleration and deceleration, can cause cerebral concussions and brain injury, including bleeding on the surface of the brains of these monkeys who have been used in various scientific research.
While Ommaya noted the difference between man and monkey, the coauthors of his study remain uncertain how their research applies to shaken-baby syndrome. Denver neurologist Yarnell, one of his research co-authors, said in an interview for this article, “The baby’s brain is a lot different than an adult monkey. [The study] just shows that you can get brain injuries from acceleration and deceleration.” He added, “I could see where people could have extrapolated. Our research wasn’t done with the specific purpose of proving that shaking babies could lead to subdurals. It was done to find out the effects of acceleration and deceleration on the brain.” In an interview for this article, Faas, the study’s other co-author, said it would be “hard to prove” the monkey injuries could be similar to those of infants because the experiments were done on monkeys, but “it seems like a reasonable application.”
In an interview for this article, Uscinski said, “People have jumped onto it [Ommaya’s monkey experiments] without thinking it all the way through. Pistons were used to accelerate the chairs holding the monkeys during the experiments, and humans cannot generate that much force with shaking,” said Uscinski, who met Ommaya in the 1970s and was mentored by him.
“The Ommaya paper emerges as the sole source of experimental data from which the initial hypothetical shaking mechanism was drawn,” Uscinski wrote in a paper published in a Japanese online medical journal, Neurologia medico-chirurgica, in 2006. “Ratification within the medical community was based principally on anecdotal reports and case studies.”
Three years after the monkey study, Dr. A. Norman Guthkelch, a British pediatric neurosurgeon, wrote a landmark paper in the British Medical Journal in 1971 suggesting that shaking of infants could lead to retinal hemorrhages and brain bleeding. In 2008, Carrie Sperling, then executive director of the Arizona Justice Project, asked Guthkelch, one of the seminal researchers of shaken-baby syndrome, to review the case of a couple whose son had had a difficult birth, lived through a serious bout of pneumonia and experienced regular seizures. One day, the seizures intensified beyond the parents’ control, and they brought their infant son to the hospital. After their child died, the boy’s father was accused of violently shaking him. Guthkelch agreed and wrote an affidavit on behalf of the defendant in that case. The state dismissed the charges against the father. “This wasn’t a one in a million kind of case,” said Sperling, now a supervising attorney for the Wisconsin Innocence Project, in an interview for this article. As Guthkelch began to review the recent medical literature on shaken-baby syndrome since his research decades earlier, “I realized that what I had described was being made into a completely different disease,” said Guthkelch, now 98 years old. “We’ve assumed the cause of shaken-baby syndrome on the basis of a few cases.” Guthkelch said the sample size of his observations was too small to make such general conclusions. The science is “greatly premature and sufficiently invalid,” he said. He added: “If I knew the whip with which innocent mothers would be beaten, I never would have written the damn thing. I stand by every damn word. Social workers would stand by it today. But I truly regretted ever having written it, because people are in jail on the basis of what they claim is my paper, when in fact it is nothing like it.”
http://www.medilljusticeproject.org/2013/12/12/monkey-business/
Rethinking Shaken Baby Syndrome: