Doudou, a 6-year-old girl, woke up in the morning and had something wrong. Her head was tilted to one side, her neck muscles were tense, and her standing posture was even more strange. Her neck was stretched forward, her mouth was open, and her chin was raised. It was diagnosed as atlantoaxial subluxation.

The family was puzzled. The child just got up from bed and did nothing. How could he dislocate? Liu Qi, director of the Rehabilitation Medicine Department of Wuhan First Hospital, asked in detail that Doudou's mother remembered that the first day, Doudou ran into someone while playing in the daytime. Liu Qi speculated that the child's neck stretched forward when hit, but there was a reaction process of soft tissue injury. The inflammation reached its peak after a night's sleep, and the symptoms appeared the next morning.

Liu Qi said yesterday that there are many atlantoaxial subluxations in children, ranging from affecting growth to life-threatening. The joint capsule and ligament of children are elastic, and the intervertebral joint surface between atlas and axis is shallow than that of adults, so the range of motion is also large. Moreover, the uncinate process of the spine in children is not fully developed, allowing excessive bending and rotation.

There are also some uncommon external causes that are easy to cause dislocation. Liu Qi said that nowadays children are nervous about their homework. They bow their heads for a long time, and their schoolbags are heavy, which makes the neck muscles tense;. Improper sleeping posture of children causes uncoordinated muscle tension; After the child's caries treatment, the acute inflammation in the mouth and back of the pharynx affected the soft tissue of the neck, which indirectly led to the edema and relaxation of the muscles, ligaments and joint capsules of the cervical spine and neck, thus leading to atlantoaxial joint subluxation.

It is specially reminded that if the child complains of neck pain, or the parents find that the child's neck movement is limited, they should seek medical advice in a timely manner. They should never become doctors, blindly massage or straighten, so as to avoid serious consequences such as spinal cord injury and paralysis. (Reporter Yu Le Correspondent Sun Ruiyu californium)