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Brain Injuries In Children

Head injuries are more common with children than you might think. Over 100,000 hospitalizations occur every year due to child brain injuries including many in the Kansas City area. Children are susceptible to many forms of injury to the brain, including automobile collisions, falls, sports injuries, child abuse and neglect, and bicycle accidents. It can be harder to determine the extent of brain damage in a child because of the relative lack of documentation regarding prior abilities. For example, there are may be fewer or no prior academic test records, intelligence quotient scores, job performance documents, and so forth.

It was once believed that children were actually less susceptible to brain damage than adults because their brains were still forming and had the ability to repair damage during further development. Now the most current findings indicate the opposite, that children are more likely to sustain permanent brain injury given similar traumas.

Following a head injury, children, like adults, may not exhibit neurological deficiencies for many years. For example, since frontal lobe functions develop later, frontal lobe injuries may not manifest until the child is a teenager and his or her higher level reasoning begins to develop or not until frontal lobe skills such as social interaction and interpersonal skills are called upon. Similarly, brain reading and writing center injuries and resulting reading and writing delays may not become evident until the child enters school and reading and writing teaching begins.

Head injury to a child can be particularly dangerous immediately following a trauma. For instance, vascular stability can be hard to maintain because brain injury can initiate an immediate dilation of the cerebral blood vessels, causing a huge rush of blood to the head in turn causing cerebral edema, raising the intracranial pressure over the next several hours and resulting in death. A child can appear normal immediately following a trauma to the brain yet suffer a loss of consciousness within hours as a result of the increase of the intercranial blood pressure.

Studies suggest that a child's skulls is only one-eighth as strong as an adult's skull. Accordingly, head trauma is more likely to cause skull fracture and deformation, both of which may cause brain damage.

In children as well as adults, brain injury symptoms are sometimes harder to recognize. In adolescents, it can be particularly difficult to recognize the difference between brain damage manifestations because teenage children often have anxiety and behavioral changes that are a normal part of their development.

Parents should be aware that children with mild brain injuries are entitled to special educational programs under the federal law. 94-142 was established to help children with learning disabilities, mentally delayed as well as emotionally disturbed children, guaranteeing them the right to obtain an education. Under federal law it is required that these children be put in an appropriate educational setting based upon their unique set of cognitive difficulties.

At Kansas City Accident Injury Attorneys, our Kansas City based personal law firm has been representing the rights of brain injury victims for more than 15 years. We have a special interest in helping children who have suffered brain injury due to the negligence of another, and we take pride in recovering for their injuries and damages on their behalf since child injury so often has a devastating impact on children. If you have a loved one who has suffered a brain injury, answers to some of your most pressing questions can be found here. You can also submit a question at our "Just Ask" section or use our live chat. For more information, contact us at 816-471-5111 for a FREE consultation with no obligation.

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