Giving birth can be a traumatic experience even when everything goes right. People hope the doctor assisting in the birth will ease the process as much as possible, and ensure the healthy delivery of their child. Unfortunately, even highly skilled doctors make mistakes, and mistakes during birth can have disastrous results. A baby boy died in Ireland one week after his birth by emergency Caesarean due to brain trauma last month. There were complications in Daniel McGovern’s birth that led to a doctor attempting to extract him with forceps. The doctor was unsuccessful with the forceps and had to deliver the boy by Caesarean. After McGovern was delivered, it was discovered that he had a prominent traumatic lesion on his head with bleeding within the skull. Birth defects and baby brain injuries can occur for a variety of reasons, and often they are accidental. In this case, the doctor used…
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Forceps Cause Deadly Head Injury
October 18, 2011Blanket Puts The Chill On Infant Brain Damage
October 14, 2011While a new technique called therapeutic hypothermia might sound a little scary, it is giving hope to infants at risk for brain injury where there have not been many options. Doctors have started wrapping at-risk newborns in cooling blankets to prevent brain damage, and it is proving to be quite effective. The cooling wraps circulate water that keeps the baby’s arms and trunk area at 33.5 degrees, down from the standard 37 degrees. They are kept at this temperature for 3 days, after which they are slowly warmed back up over a 24-hour period. The cooling blanket can reduce the chance of brain injury by 25 percent. Doctors still do not know why lowering body temperature slows damage to the brain, but the theory is that lower temperature slows the rate at which damage can occur. According to Dr. Amit Mathur, neonatal ICU medical director at St. Louis Children’s Center,…
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10 Epilepsy Drugs Appear To Cause Birth Defects
October 12, 2011There is an ever-increasing list of prescription drugs found to increase the risk of birth defects, and new evidence shows that FDA should add some of the most common epilepsy drugs to the list. AdverseEvents, Inc. a company that analyzes the FDA’s adverse drug event database says that 10 of the most popular epilepsy drugs in the United States have been found to have a large numbers of birth defect-related adverse events. Carbatrol/Tegretol, Depacon/Kene/Kote, Dilantin, Keppra (and IR, Klonopin, Lamictal, Neurontin, Topomax, Trileptal, and Zonegran were found to have more than 25 individual birth defect case reports. AdverseEvents is recommending that the drugs be re-classified to D class from C class, associating them with “positive evidence of human fetal risk”. Class D drugs are generally not prescribed to pregnant women unless there is no less risky alternative. It is especially significant that the FDA re-classify these drugs because most epileptic…
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