After the birth of a child, young parents are concerned about a number of issues concerning the health of their baby. The first of them may appear after a visual inspection. Without attention, the size of the baby's head is unlikely to remain if it is clearly abnormal.
Immediately after birth, the head is the norm for the head about 33-35 cm. In the first year, the head circumference grows by 10-12 cm. The fastest head growth in normal healthy children is noted in the first three months of life. However, do not worry if there are any violations. This does not indicate a pathology. A huge role in this is played by the gene factor of the parents.
If there are endocrine disorders in the mother's body, such as hyperthyroidism or diabetes mellitus, there is usually a change in the size of the child's head in the direction of increase. This pathology can lead to difficulty in childbirth, since the baby's head in this case can hardly pass through the mother's pelvis. In these cases, a caesarean section is usually given.
During the first year of life, the child's head grows particularly quickly - in no other period of life the child's body grows so quickly. In the first six months the size of the child's head grows by an average of one and a half centimeter every month, in the second half a year - by half a centimeter a month. In different children, the growth rate can vary in different months. It can be a change of both a physiological and a pathological nature.
If the nature of the changes is physiological, the volume of the child's head remains within the norm specified in the centile tables, which are the average value of the parameters of the physical development of children of different ages, that is, reflecting the correspondence of the head's coverage to the child's age.
At visual inspection in a polyclinic the pediatrist looks not only on how much the head has grown, but also how this growth corresponds with centilial tables. There are cases when a child is born with an enlarged head size, but the growth of his head is slow, so according to the tables, his development is considered normal.
An increase in the growth rate of the child's head size can often be observed with hydrocephalus. This pathology in most cases develops in premature infants, in children with intrauterine hypoxia, children born with asphyxia. It is characterized by the fact that the brain is affected, resulting in the accumulation of fluid inside the skull, increasing the size of the intracranial box, and, consequently, the size of the baby's head. At the same time, the fontanels of the baby can hardly grow, they can swell and pulsate, especially when the child screams. Since the edema is mainly located in the brain, the facial part of the skull is significantly smaller than the brain.
Another sign with hydrocephalus is that the baby's head grows much faster than the volume of the breast, although in normal development, on the contrary - the growth rate of the breast is much higher than the growth rate of the head. With hydrocephalus, the head may be larger or equal to the volume of the thorax. To make the picture of the disease, ultrasound examination of the brain is made more clearly, by means of which the places in which fluid and enlarged chambers of the brain are accumulated are identified. Children with hydrocephalus should be examined regularly by a neurologist.
The course of treatment includes taking medications to improve brain nutrition, such as nootropil and piracetam, and diuretic drugs such as furasemide. It is recommended to pass the course of general massage. With properly conducted treatment, a child's development is no different from his peers. If treatment has not been done for some reason, in most cases children with hydrocephalus lag behind in mental development, they start to sit up late, talk and walk late.
Most often, a large head in a baby is not an anomaly at all, but a manifestation of constitutional signs, that is, the size of the head repeats the dimensions of the head of someone from the previous generation. More attention should be paid to how the child's overall development is going - if it is normal (both in the opinion of the parents and in the opinion of the pediatrician), then it is not worth worrying about.