Experts Cite Frustration in Shaken-Baby Deaths

Shaken baby syndrome occurs when a person holds a baby under the arms, face to face, and shakes the child violently in a mostly horizontal motion.

“It would be like what would it take to shake the stuffing out of a teddy bear’s head,” says Dr. Randall Alexander, vice chairman of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Iowa.

The shaking motion is rapid--back and forth three times in one second, inflicting “severe, violent acceleration, de-acceleration injuries to the brain,” Alexander says.

The brain becomes compressed and then damaged, and there is a stretching and shearing of the blood vessels that attach the brain to the skull, says Dr. Nicholas Cunningham, chairman of the child protection committee at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

The consequences are always life-threatening.

Usually, the baby suffers no visible injuries such as finger marks or bruises, the doctors say.

There are about 1,000 to 1,500 shaken baby deaths annually in the United States, Alexander estimates.

He says people who shake babies to death generally fit the profile of those who physically abuse children--young boyfriends or stepfathers who abuse alcohol or drugs and have an impulse-control problem.

But Cunningham disagrees. “It is usually unpremeditated,” he says. “It is an act of violence created in the heat of the moment. It might be someone completely frustrated by the crying of a child.

“It is often somebody who is not the usual caretaker, not used to babies.”