Some Bleeding Found in Babies’ Brains

U.S. researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of babies soon after birth and found a small amount of bleeding in some children.

Small bleeds in and around the brain are very common in infants who are born vaginally, said Dr. H. Gilmore of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. It seems that a normal vaginal birth can cause these small bleeds.

For the study, 88 asymptomatic infants, equally divided between male and female, underwent MRI between the ages of one and five weeks. Sixty-five had been delivered vaginally and 23 had been delivered by Caesarean section. MR images showed that 17, or 26 percent, of the babies who had been delivered vaginally had intracranial hemorrhages, or small bleeds in and around the brain.

In our study, neither the size of the baby or the baby’s head, the length of the labor, nor the use of vacuum or forceps to assist the delivery caused the bleeds, Gilmore said. The bleeds are probably caused by pressure on the skull during delivery.

The study appears in the February issue of Radiology.