Abstract
Abusive head trauma (AHT) represents a commonly misdiagnosed condition. In fact, there is no pathognomonic sign that allows the diagnosis in children. Therefore, it is such an important medico-legal challenge to evaluate reliable diagnostic tools. The aim of this review is to evaluate the current scientific evidence to assess what the best practice is in order to diagnose AHT. We have focused particularly on evaluating the importance of circumstantial evidence, clinical history, the use of postmortem radiological examinations (such as CT and MRI), and the performance of the autopsy. After autopsy, histological examination of the eye and brain play an important role, with attention paid to correlation with symptoms found in vivo.
Highlights
To find out how current medical practice identifies Abusive head trauma (AHT), we focused our attention on examining the symptom triad
The reference lists of all located articles were reviewed to detect still unidentified literature. This search identified 4790 articles, that were screened based on their abstract to identify their relevance in respect to the following:
A further categorization of the articles included in the study was made on the basis of the main parameter under study, as showed by the following table (Table 1)
Summary
Academic Editors: Hiroshi Ikegaya and Marco Di Paolo. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Child abuse is the physical, sexual, and/or psychological abuse or neglect of a child or children, especially by a parent or caregiver. This condition can include any act or omission by a parent or caregiver that results in actual or potential harm to a child. Four categories of abuse can be distinguished: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional/psychological abuse, and neglect. Physical abuse can occur through hitting, beating, kicking, shaking, biting, choking, scalding, burning, poisoning, and suffocating
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