Over the last decade or so, Cian O’Carroll Solicitors has led the way in establishing traumatic and negligent causes of brain injuries leading to autism. Whether occurring through lack of oxygen immediately prior to birth, by physical head trauma during a vacuum or forceps assisted delivery or through poor management of brain haemorrhage, jaundice or hypoglycaemia in the first days of life, we have successfully established in each of these situations a causal link with a later diagnosis of autism.
A Parent’s Concern
If your child has been diagnosed with autism, and there was a difficult or traumatic birth, or a challenging period in those early hours and days of life, you may be asking yourself whether there was a failure in the care they received.
How is the injury caused?
Back in 2019, we represented a family in what became the first successful case in Ireland linking autism to birth-related trauma. Since that case, we have developed a particular expertise in this area and have gone on to act in many similar cases.
That injury most commonly occurs through a lack of oxygen, what doctors call hypoxic ischaemia, during labour or delivery. It can also arise through physical trauma, for example in a poorly managed instrumental delivery using forceps or
vacuum. Equally, the neonatal period, those first hours and days after birth, is critical. Failures
to recognise or treat conditions such as hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy, low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia), or severe jaundice (causing kernicterus) can also lead to brain injury.
When brain cells are injured at that stage of development, the effects are not always immediately obvious. In some cases, the injury is severe and leads to conditions like cerebral palsy. In others, the injury is more subtle, but still very significant, and may later present, among other diagnoses, as autism.
How To Approach Birth Related Autism Injury Cases
One has to be realistic about these cases. They are complex. They require very detailed investigation and typically involve multiple independent experts from different countries and different specialties.
The first question is whether there was a failure in care; whether something happened that should not have happened.
The second, and often more difficult question, is whether that failure caused an injury to the child’s brain, and whether that injury can be linked to the eventual diagnosis on the autism spectrum.
In the many cases we have successfully brought to date, there are often common features.
Many of those children showed clear signs of oxygen deprivation around the time of birth. That may be reflected in a diagnosis of moderate or Grade II Hypoxic
Ischaemic Encephalopathy. It may also be seen in the medical records through abnormal umbilical cord blood gases, showing low oxygen levels, high carbon dioxide, or elevated lactate.
Clinically, babies may have been very unwell in those early hours, showing jitteriness, seizures, or abnormal tone, being either unusually floppy or rigid. These are important signs that something has gone wrong.
How Can We Help?
Our job is to examine those records in detail, identify any areas of concern, and then ask leading international experts to provide an independent opinion on the care that was given.
If that care is found to be deficient, we must then go further and consider all other
possible causes of autism, including genetic and environmental factors, and exclude them, where appropriate.
Only then, through what is usually a complex combination of expert evidence, can we establish a causal link between negligent care and the diagnosis.
Where that link can be established, legal proceedings can be brought.
These cases are important, not just in terms of accountability, but because they allow us to fully assess and provide for the child’s needs in terms of therapy, care, education, accommodation, and support for the family into the future.
None of this is to suggest that autism is usually caused by birth injury. It is not. These cases represent a relatively small subset.
But where that is the cause, families are entitled to know the truth. And they are
entitled to ensure that the care and support their child will need over a lifetime is properly provided for; and that is the work that we do.
Learn more about our cases and how we have worked with our clients to achieve life changing results in terms of damages, provision of care and accountability.
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