NBC NEWS HEALTH
Nearly half of babies have flat spots, study finds
Terri Peters
Terri Peters's daughter Kennedy had a flat spot on her head and wore a little pink helmet for three months to correct it.
The culprit – or culprits – are likely all the devices designed to hold babies safe and still, the team at Mount Royal University in Calgary reported.
“The reason why we want to catch this early is because if we see children with flattened heads, sometimes there are changes in their facial features,” says Aliyah Mawji, a registered nurse at the university who led the study.
Pediatricians and pediatric nurses have noticed a big increase in the number of babies with flat spots on their heads – a condition known as positional plagiocephaly ("oblique head" in Greek).
Most experts say it’s due to advice to put babies to sleep on their backs – which in turn has slashed rates of sudden infant deaths syndrome or SIDS. But babies have big, heavy heads and weak little necks, which means their heads tend to roll to one side. Because their skulls are still soft, this can cause a flat spot.
Terri Peters of Pasadena, Md. says it happened to her daughter Kennedy. "She was such a low-key, easy baby," says Peters, who blogged about Kennedy's progress.
"She smushed one side of her head down and slept in one spot in that seat for two months and and I didn’t think anything of it because she was a good baby and we had a toddler and we had just moved into a new house," adds Peters. "She would tuck her little head into her shoulder."
At two months, the pediatrician noticed. "I didn't see it," says Peters. "I was in complete denial." But when she looks at baby pictures of Kennedy, now nearly 3, she can tell. "It was on the right side of her head. Her eye was squinty on one side. If you looked at her two ears, one was a little displaced from the other one."
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