About CP

What is Cerebral Palsy ?

Cerebral palsy is a neurodevelopmental condition that begins early in life and persists throughout adulthood. A recently published report defines cerebral palsy as ‘ a group of permanent disorders of the development of movement and posture, causing activity limitations that are attributable to disturbances that occurred in the developing fetal or infant brain. The motor disorders may be accompanied by disturbances of sensation, perception, cognition, communication, and behavior, by epilepsy, and by secondary musculoskeletal problems’. CP is thought to be a non-progressive neurological injury, in that the pathophysiological mechanisms that lead to it are from a single or discrete series of events that are not active at the time of diagnosis. This injury results in a disruption of normal brain structure and function, which over time, may be associated with changing or additional clinical manifestations.

Cerebral palsy is defined by motor dysfunction and is described by muscle tone and coordination and by body part involvement. The five different types of cerebral palsy are spastic, athetoid, spastic athetoid, ataxic and hypotonic. The most common type is spastic CP. Patients who are categorized as having spastic cerebral palsy generally have too much muscle tone which causes stiffness in the legs, arms, and back. The stiffness in these areas causes the legs to turn in inward creating a “scissoring” effect as the individual walks. Those with spastic hemiparesis are usually highly functional, while those with spastic quadriplegia have more severe impairment accompanied by other associated conditions.

The Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation recently led an international effort to help standardize the definition and classification of cerebral palsy. The result of that work was a document published in the scientific journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. Standardization of the definition and classification will lead to a better understanding of risk factors for cerebral palsy as well as means to conduct more meaningful clinical trials of promising new therapies to prevent and treat children and adults with this condition. See entire document on the Definition and Classification of Cerebral Palsy.