What Should You Do If You Suspect Your Child Has Developmental Delays (Delayed Milestones)

What should you do if you suspect your child has developmental delays a.k.a. delayed milestones? You’re in the right place if you want to know the answer to that question.

Learn More:

What Should You Do If You Suspect Brain Injury During Labor?

What is HIE? – Birth Asphyxia (Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy)

What is Birth Injury? – Birth Injury Overview

Video Transcript

Timestamps 
0:00 Intro
0:13 Understanding Delayed Milestones
1:03 Developmental Concerns
1:57 Sensitive Areas To Decreased Oxygen

0:13 Understanding Delayed Milestones 

Hello everyone, this is Dr. Franҫois Blaudeau, with LawMD.  I’m here today to talk to you about developmental delays – what that is, and why it’s important to have some understanding of what you can do if all of a sudden, you realize that your baby may have delayed milestones. 

You may have had a hard labor and you may have had some suspicion that maybe the baby didn’t get enough oxygen during the course of the labor. 

But after the baby was born, the baby seemed to get better. Doctors told you, “Hey, we’ve done some imaging, and we don’t see any issue and we think the baby’s probably going to be fine.” 

You drop it at that point, and you just get on with loving and taking care of your baby. 

1:03 Developmental Concerns 

And then months later, maybe all of a sudden, the baby hasn’t met milestones. And when you go to the pediatrician, the baby’s not crawling at the right time, or the baby’s difficulty struggling to stand and walk, or the baby’s having difficulty with its word-formation or other fundamental milestones. 

If that happens, and you think there’s a potential that the baby is really having developmental delays, then you need to take the baby to a pediatric neurologist, get an MRI done, and see if there’s any delayed effect from a birth injury. That’s very important. 

MRI scanning nowadays is sensitive enough that it can pick up mild changes in the areas of the brain that are more susceptible to decreased oxygen during labor. So, you can have a hypoxic or decreased oxygen event during the course of the labor or the course of the delivery, they can affect certain parts of the brain while most of the brain does okay. 

1:57 Sensitive Areas to Decreased Oxygen 

And those parts of the brain more sensitive to decreased oxygen, they may have mild injury that may or may not recover. 

In those cases that where they don’t recover, it can be really subtle, that becomes more prominent over time and usually, it’s first diagnosed as developmental delays. 

At LawMD we encourage you if you think you had a hard labor and your child is starting to show some developmental delays, please get your child evaluated by a pediatric neurologist. Get MRI testing done in the brain. If there’s evidence of an Ischemic oxygen deficient-related injury, then reach out to LAWMD and let us help you look at the records and see if the standard of care was met or not met, whether the injury could have been avoided or not, so that we can help your baby get the additional resources that baby will need to be successful in its life. 

At LawMD, our physician-attorneys are committed to supporting parents and families who have been devastated by a birth injury diagnosis, such as hypoxia during labor.  More than 12 of our lawyers are also physicians.  As doctors, we understand the medicine in your case. As lawyers, we know how to use our medical knowledge to get justice for our clients.  If you or your loved one has been permanently or seriously injured due to negligence, contact the Medical-Legal team at LawMD. 

For serious birth injuries, LawMD is the right medicine for justice.