Birth Trauma and Perinatal Brain Damage

This book focuses on traumatic birth injuries, predominantly of the skull and brain, as well as hemorrhagic and ischemic disorders of cerebral circulation in fetuses and newborns, providing information on each condition’s classification, incidence, etiology and pathogenesis, pathomorphology, clinic, diagnostics, prognosis, and complications. It discusses the configuration (molding) of the head, venous congestion, displacements of cranial bones, ruptures of the cerebellar tentorium during labor, and the compression of the skull and brain damage caused by obstetric operations and asynclitic insertion of the head, while also describing the importance of the periosteal stagnation of the skull to assess the delivery and explanation of tentorium tears. Intracranial hemorrhages are considered in detail, taking into account the role of the traumatic factor in their occurrence and hypoxic-ischemic brain lesions (periventricular leukomalacia, selective neuronal necrosis, multicystic encephalomalacia, etc.). Lastly, it offers the world’s first explanation of why tentorium tears occur most frequently in the left half, providing an original classification of damaged tentoria, subarachnoid and intraventricular hemorrhages, and the degree of configuration of the head in childbirth. Given the depth and breadth of its coverage, the book offers an essential resource for neonatologists, obstetricians-gynecologists, perinatologists, pediatric neurologists, pathologists, pediatricians, forensic experts and neuroimaging professionals.

About the Author

Vasily V. Vlasyuk is a doctor of medical sciences, professor, WHO expert, and full member of the European Academy of Natural Sciences. After graduating from the Leningrad Pediatric Institute, he worked as a pediatrician, then as a research fellow at the Institute of Perinatal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Georgia, as head of the morphology laboratory at the Institute of Mycoses, Hospital №122 FMBA of Russia, Children’s Hospital and at the Institute of Childhood Infections in St. Petersburg. He has worked as a WHO expert on infant mortality in Mongolia, and has personally performed over 5,000 autopsies on fetuses and newborns. His main research interests are the pathology of the central nervous system in fetuses and newborns, birth injury, intracranial hemorrhages, childhood infections, and the role of immunohistochemical studies in morphology.