References

Shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is the most common cause of death related to child abuse; nonfatal consequences of SBS include varying degrees of visual, motor and cognitive impairment due to severe brain damage in almost 30 % of infants with SBS. Brain damage occurs from the biomechanical forces, swelling, ischemia and altered vascular autoregulation and from additionally axonal damage[1].In the pre-sent study we want to examine a cohort of 7 patient affected by SBS and compare their data with controls choosen by same range of age, 19 months till 60. Using MRI techniques we define a new paradigm for demonstrating, through voxel based mor-phometry, deficiencies, connected to white and grey matter regions, in the prefrontal cortex and also in the hippocampus, amygdala, corpus callosum and optical radia-tion. Adding diffusion tensor imaging technique by constrained spherical deconvolu-tion[2] our study put in evidence connectivity between investigated areas, suggesting neural network abnormalities. With this “state of art ” studies we can show a correla-tion between childhood abuse and brain structures modification. Our aim is to make a longitudinal study on the anatomical data of these patients following their clinica