#craniosynostosis

[pacificremains]

Strange baby rabbit skull collection. Possible cebocephaly ?? on the funkiest one. The conehead has craniosynostosis, and the rest have hydrocephaly. One of those is currently in the PacificRemains Etsy shop (April 2024)

[bpod-bpod]

Crossed Skull Bones

Your skull is formed not of one single smooth bone, but 22 tessellating plates like a 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Where they intersect, sections are joined by sutures which allow the skull to expand as a baby grows. When children are born with craniosynostosis or other birth defects, these sutures are absent and repeated invasive operations are needed to allow skull expansion. To understand why slight genetic irregularities cause such significant problems, researchers painstakingly analysed a growing mouse suture cell by cell to generate an atlas of development. They found 14 types of cell involved, and identified new genes linked to producing stem cells (starter cells, green in the suture pictured soon after birth) between the two bones (purple). Mice with craniosynostosis also showed unusually symmetrical distribution of these stem cells, which mismanaged the bone alignment. Revealing these developmental details may lead to less invasive, or even preventative, treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by D’Juan T. Farmer and colleagues

Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, August 2021

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[craniodad]

Still beating on, boats against the current

This is not the update that we ALL are waiting for, but it is an update. Come get caught up. #cranio #update

We are still in a holding pattern. Making it to appointments, meeting new specialist, but something is different. Unlike the normality of what we have been through, there is a stark contrast, this time.

Early on we developed a narrative, an elevator pitch, about what our daughter has going on. There was a need. We could see it through the subtle wrenching of the face, the slight tilt of the…

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[ravensmuse]

Noah is having another surgery next week. This is a cranial distractor. The space will allow his skull to grow back and out into a normal shape, instead of growing up.

He’s had 3 or 4 surgeries already but his skull fused too quickly after each surgery so progress has been slow and they haven’t reached the desired outcome. 

[minorinspirations]

What Happens When You Don't Want to Go Back?

What Happens When You Don’t Want to Go Back?

There’s something interesting that happens to the way people respond to situations after we go through stuff. You know, the kind of stuff that no one asks for, but that of which everyone has some version. Stuff that shapes who we are and how we relate to the world around us. If I am talking about all the craziness our family has gone through with Zoey, September is that month for me in a…

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[marlo-jadson]

The Moon and my Head

Scaphocephaly, from the Greek for skiff, is the elongated shape of the skull resulted from prenatal fusing of the sagittal suture. Pressure from the budding brain expands the dome bow and aft to resemble the bottom of an overturned ship. Surgery is often required. The Pacific Ocean is where some theorized the Moon broke off from infant Earth, mere excess flung aside by centrifugal forces, pressures in the proto planetary age billions of years ago, a hunk of white rock just sloughed off, a sail in the solar winds. As a newborn my crown was dissected, two inches of bone from the back detached— two inches of smooth white mantle, gone. A scar like the Marianas marks the separation of my scalp. I get headaches sometimes when the moon is full.

[pacificremains]

Young rab.bits with craniosynostosis (early fused cranial suture)

[pacificremains]

First skull of 2021. Dwarf breed ra.bbit with craniosynostosis - both coronal sutures are absent! Made the head into a pyramid.