New cerebral palsy treatment customizes care for patients …

New research is giving children withcerebral palsy a more customized treatment plan, meaning each patient receives optimal care for his or her specific condition.

Cerebral palsy is caused by damage to the motor control centers of the developing brain and can occur during pregnancy or childbirth, or shortly after birth. Brain damage restricts arm and leg motor functions, which affects limb movement and posture. Those restrictions differ among patients and that makes treatment difficult. Physicians must be able to fully understand patient movement restrictions to design treatment plans.

To help doctors better determine a patients limitations, Scott Coleman and his colleagues at Baylor University Medical Centers Motion and Sports Lab joined investigators in Sweden to carefully study movement through three-dimensional gait analysis. Researchers compared two groups a patient group and a control group, each with a mean age of 17 to study how cerebral palsy patients move compared to their peers. As a result, Coleman and his colleague devised four new clinical categories that patients can be assigned for optimal treatment.

This should give doctors that have access to a gait laboratory further insight into a treatment plan and outcome of surgical intervention for a particular child with cerebral palsy, said Coleman.

The four new clinical categories created by Colemans team were:

After the success of his research, Coleman and his Swedish colleagues are collaborating on further studies on gait analysis to be published in the next several years.

As innovative treatments continue to empower those currently living with cerebral palsy, a recent decline in diagnoses suggests improved perinatal care is helping to eliminate the condition altogether.

Researchers from the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands found that only 2.2% of infants born between 2002 and 2005 were diagnosed with cerebral palsy. That number shows a drastic decline from the period between 1990 and 1993, when 6.5% were of infants were diagnosed.

Common causes of cerebral palsy include infection, hypoxia, birth trauma during labor and delivery, and maternal complications. Obstetricians must take special precautions when risk factors such as low birth weight and breech births are identified.

Read more about the causes and symptoms of cerebral palsy, or contact our firm for a free consultation if you believe a loved one developed cerebral palsy because of a medical error.

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New cerebral palsy treatment customizes care for patients ...