Cerebral Palsy
By Brendan Scott
What is Cerebral Palsy (CP) ?
Cerebral Palsy is considered a neurological disorder caused by a non-progressive brain injury or malformation that occurs while the child’s brain is under development. It affects body movement, muscle control, muscle coordination, muscle tone, reflex, posture and balance. It can also impact fine motor skills, gross motor skills and oral motor functioning.
What causes CP?
Cerebral Palsy is actually caused by brain damage. The brain damage is caused by brain injury or abnormal development of the brain that occurs while a child’s brain is still developing — before birth, during birth, or immediately after birth.
Normal vs. Injured Brain
On the right, you can see the frontal lobe (the part of the brain that hold the motor cortex) swelling. This is the first sign of CP
CP kids laughing and playing
As you can see, the effects of Cerebral Palsy range in severity. However, this disorder doesn't prevent the kids from having a good time.
CP aquired before Birth?
In some cases Cerebral Palsy can occur after birth. In these cases the baby looks and moves just like a healthy baby at birth.
The different roles of Prevention
- Medical role - Premature births are a major cause of the condition, the physicians, nurses and medical professionals play the pivotal role of seeing a pregnancy through birth.
- Government role- funding research, collecting data, and examining causal factors through its various agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the CDC.
- Researcher's role- learn more about what causes Cerebral Palsy so that measures can be made to educate and inform medical professionals and parents.
Symptoms, Detection, Treatment.
Symptoms:
- Variations in muscle tone, such as being either too stiff or too floppy
- Stiff muscles and exaggerated reflexes (spasticity)
- Stiff muscles with normal reflexes (rigidity)
- Lack of muscle coordination (ataxia)
- Tremors or involuntary movements
- Slow, writhing movements (athetosis)
- Delays in reaching motor skills milestones, such as pushing up on arms, sitting up alone or crawling
Detection: Basically if you see these symptoms then thats how you can detect CP.
Treatment: Treating Cerebral Palsy is almost as complex as the condition is, and there’s no cookie-cutter approach because each individual is affected differently.While therapy and adaptive equipment are the primary treatment protocol for Cerebral Palsy, an individual may also require drug therapy and surgical interventions.
Bibliography
There's only one link I used for all of these sections.