Well, folks, for me I need pictures to understand things. This article helped me better understand what happened to little Alexa medically speaking. Maybe this will help someone else, too.
This part of the article is down near end of the discussion I cited below.
Seeing this picture and the discussion below it helped me better understand why this little girl was so critically and irreparably damaged. Her being so young was a big factor that worked against her having a good outcome from the hideous things those people did to the precious little girl named Alexa.
Effects of physical factors on hyponatraemic encephalopathy.
Children under 16 years of age are at increased risk for developing hyponatraemic encephalopathy due to their relatively larger brain to intracranial volume ratio compared with adults [
15,
25]. A childs brain reaches adult size by 6 years of age, whereas the skull does not reach adult size until 16 years of age [
26,
27]. Consequently, children have less room available in their rigid skulls for brain expansion and are likely to develop brain herniation from hyponatraemia at higher serum sodium concentrations than adults. Children will have a high morbidity from symptomatic hyponatraemia unless appropriate therapy is instituted early [
10,
14
17]. After the third decade of life, the brain begins to atrophy, with the steepest reduction in brain volume occurring after 50 years of age [
28,
29]. The brain volume of an 80 year old is approximately 25% less than of a child. Consequently, the elderly are at the lowest risk of developing CNS manifestations of hyponatraemia.
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http://ndt.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/12/2486.full
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