Intracerebral haematoma: traumatic or non-traumatic.

A 35-year-old woman, a chronic alcoholic, died from an intracerebral haematoma 10 hr after she fell downstairs. Some subcutaneous bleeding was seen on the head and face, but there were no new skull fractures and surface contusions of the brain. She appeared to have few predisposing conditions for non-traumatic cerebral haemorrhage. In addition, the haematoma was mainly located "lateral" to the basal ganglia, not where hypertensive bleeding most commonly occurs, and subdural and haemorrhage in the corpus callosum was found with subdural/and subarachnoid haemorrhage. We concluded that on falling a shearing strain from a rotating force produced the intracerebral haemorrhage, but without skull fractures and surface contusions of the brain. She had been admitted to a neurosurgical hospital just 11 months before this incident because of an epidural haemorrhage with left temporal bone fracture. Mild thrombocytopenia was found during that hospitalization. In this report, this abnormality was thought to have some relation to the formation of the huge haematoma occurring after the intracerebral bleeding started.