ReviewInternational journal of legal medicine2021
Spinal cord injury as an indicator of abuse in forensic assessment of abusive head trauma (AHT).
Review in International journal of legal medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pediatric abusive spine trauma: a review of whole-spine imaging essentials.Pediatric radiology · 2026Review
- Abusive head trauma: a consensus statement on a shared workflow model within the Balkan network for quality improvement in forensic medicine.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2026Article
- Guidance for a clinical and forensic diagnosis of pediatric abusive head trauma: a narrative review.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2026Review
- Spinal cord injury in abusive and accidental head injury in children, a neuropathological investigation.International journal of legal medicine · 2025Article
- Added value of postmortem mri in sudden unexpected infant death cases.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2025Article
- Divergent interpretations of child abuse in legal judgments: perspectives from clinicians and forensic experts.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2024Article
- Prosecuting cases of abusive head trauma in Switzerland: a descriptive study of the impact of medical documentation and delay of reporting on judicial outcome.International journal of legal medicine · 2024Article
- Clinical and Forensic Investigation Protocols for Diagnosing Abusive Head Trauma: A Literature Review.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- A bibliometric analysis on traumatic brain injury in forensic medicine of a half-century (1972-2021).Frontiers in neurology · 2023Article
- Current issues and controversies surrounding spine imaging and the significance of spinal subdural hemorrhage in suspected abusive head trauma.Pediatric radiology · 2022Article
- Epidural and subdural hematoma following spinal anesthesia in infants rat model.European journal of translational myology · 2022Article
- Complex Pathophysiology of Abusive Head Trauma with Poor Neurological Outcome in Infants.Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society · 2022Article
- Response to Colombari et al. (2021).International journal of legal medicine · 2022Article
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6 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Abusive head trauma (AHT) in children is notoriously one of the most challenging diagnoses for the forensic pathologist. The pathological "triad", a combination of intracranial subdural haematoma, cerebral oedema with hypoxic-ischaemic changes and retinal haemorrhages, is frequently argued to be insufficient to support a corroborated verdict of abuse. Data from all available English-language scientific literature involving radiological and neuropathological spinal cord examination is reviewed here in order to assess the contribution of spinal cord changes in differentiating abusive from accidental head trauma. In agreement with the statistically proven association between spinal subdural haemorrhage (SDH) and abuse (Choudhary et al. in Radiology 262:216-223, 2012), spinal blood collection proved to be the most indicative finding related to abusive aetiology. The incidence of spinal blood collection is as much as 44-48% when all the spinal cord levels are analysed as opposed to just 0-18% when the assessment is performed at cervical level only, in agreement with the evidence of the most frequent spinal SDH location at thoracolumbar rather than cervical level. In this review, the source of spinal cord blood collection and how the age of the child relates to the position of spinal cord lesions is also discussed. We concluded that the ante mortem MRI examination and post mortem examination of whole-length spinal cord is of fundamental interest for the assessment of abuse in the forensic setting.
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