Nearly Half of Two Month Olds Have Flat Spots on Head

A 1990s campaign 'Back to sleep' encouraging parents to place infants on their back to sleep in order to prevent sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has led to an increase in the  condition called 'Plagiocephaly' (i.e. flat spots on the head), according to a new finding.

The flat head syndrome or Plagiocephaly is characterized by an asymmetrical distortion of the skull. It is either distinguished by a flat spot on the back or one side of the head. Generally at birth slight Plagiocephaly is diagnosed, reports Wikipedia.

Reports according to NCBI state that the risk of flat head can be modified by positioning the baby on alternate days with head either to right or the left side. They do this by increasing time spent in the prone position during awake periods.

The study was based on a sample of 440 infants of seven to twelve weeks from four different Calgary community health centers in 2010.

The study researchers noticed that nearly 46 percent of infants of age seven to 12 weeks had some form of flat spots on their head. Out of these 63.2 percent suffered from flattening on the right side and nearly 78 percent were mild cases, reports The Globe and Mail.

"If they've got a flat spot on one side, what that likely means is that they've got the forehead protrusion on the same side and they also have a bit of ear shifting forward on the same side," said Aliyah Mawji of the school of nursing at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

According to the researchers, these deformations are just cosmetic and in rare cases trigger some medical problems. If these distortions are left untreated then they have the potential to affect the child in later life. In short, these flat spots are harmless. Children with these positional flat spots have a slight delay in development and this vanishes by the 18th months.

"There are no functional problems that I know of, except for a distorted head," said Dr. S. Anthony Wolfe, head of plastic surgery and director of craniofacial surgery at Miami Children's Hospital, who did not work on the new study, but reviewed it.

Mawji said it was common for infants to roll their head from one side to other but parents must put in an effort to balance the pressure put on the head by changing the infant's sleeping position i.e. by turning the baby's head to the left if it slept turning its head to the right the previous night.

Data according to the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention states that nearly 2,200 babies are affected with SIDs per year in the United States. Apart from this, the American Academy of Pediatrics clearly states that parents should make sure that infants receive a lot of tummy time as the risk of flat spots are reduced by this.  

The details of this finding were published in the journal Pediatrics.