A new review provides three steps pediatricians can take to better diagnose cerebral palsy in full-term infants who don’t have “red flag” signs of the disease. These strategies may help children with CP to gain earlier access to interventions — allowing treatment to begin during the critical periods of…
Mild hand impairments in children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy are linked to lesions in specific regions of the brain made up of white matter — myelinated nerve segments, or axons, that are responsible for the transmission of nerve signals between different areas of the brain, a study says.
Australian pediatricians and physiotherapists said sharing skills and good communication between multidisciplinary clinical teams is essential to improve diagnosis and manage hip displacement in children with cerebral palsy. The study, “Health professionals’ experiences and barriers encountered when implementing hip surveillance for children with cerebral palsy,” was published in the…
Stem cells derived from the umbilical cord can protect nerve cells from injury caused before birth, a study in mice has found. The results favor moving forward with cell therapies as potential therapeutic alternatives to treating neurological conditions caused by brain injury, such as cerebral palsy.
A new study suggests that socioeconomically disadvantaged children with cerebral palsy are at greater risk of having more severe disease. The study, “Impact of social disadvantage on cerebral palsy severity,” was published in the journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. The study used data from the…
Xeomin (incobotulinumtoxinA) has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat chronic sialorrhea, or excessive drooling, a condition often experienced by people with cerebral palsy. Merz Neurosciences, a division of Merz North America, announced that its supplemental biologics license application (sLBA)…
DNA modifications in circulating blood cells could be used one day as a test to distinguish patients with spastic cerebral palsy from healthy individuals with an accuracy of 73 percent, new research shows. The study, “Epigenetic machine learning: utilizing DNA methylation patterns to predict spastic cerebral palsy,” was…
Therapeutic hypothermia — induced cooling of the body for a short time — in newborn babies deprived of oxygen at or around the time of their birth is effective in preventing cerebral palsy, according to a review study. Likewise, caffeine given to preterm newborns as they were being weaned from…
Malnutrition affects a majority of children with cerebral palsy, mainly due to severe motor disability. Better tools are needed to assess their nutritional status and to design improved rehabilitation plans for these young patients, researchers in Turkey suggest. Their study, “…
Chronic pain is common among patients with cerebral palsy and leads to a significantly negative impact on patients’ quality of life. More studies are needed to better understand the cause of this pain and to develop effective treatments, researchers said in a recent study. The review study, “Pathophysiology of…