It is important to understand how spasticity can impact the muscles and the know what treatments are available to help.
The Cerebral Palsy Foundation has created a factsheet to help guide you in understanding and treating pain with CP. This fact sheet has been created for individuals with cerebral palsy to provide basic guidance surrounding common causes and potential treatment of pain.
Cerebral palsy refers to a group of conditions that are caused by problems in brain development and that affect how movement and motor control happen in children. Problems with walking and talking are often the way people start a conversation about cerebral palsy.
Cerebral palsy is an injury to the brain, but what we find is that it has a lot of effects on how you use your muscles.
For people with a physical disability, activity is a lifestyle. It's something that can start in physical therapy, but it really is something that has to be carried over into their everyday lives. What has happened over the years is we're understanding the importance of mobility.
When first meeting a parent who's had a child newly diagnosed with cerebral palsy, I really want to try and help them understand their baby. It can be difficult for parents to take it in all at once and many leave that first interview quite overwhelmed, but you're going to meet some really important and helpful people.
Babies develop about 80% of their brain growth over the first two years of life, and it's also when all the connections in the brain, what we call the white matter, which is the cables in the brain, grow and develop and connect to the cortex.
One of the things that we typically forget when we look at kids who have conditions like CP, is that they're first and foremost, children.
Everybody tells stories, and that includes people who use communication systems. To ensure success and the ability to participate we need to make it as easy as possible. So that we can tell stories whenever we want, wherever we want, to whomever we want, and in a really easy way, so we can be successful.
The World Health Organization has developed the ‘International Classification of Function’. This gives us a way to think about any health condition. Here we can see many ideas that we need to think about with CP. We can also see how these many ideas are connected to one another.
A lot of parents don't realize that their baby, all the skills that they have. So they can look at you, they can follow you. They're already starting to imitate you, and through the first few months of life, they're already starting to learn to reach and grasp toys, and to have nonverbal communication with you.
Early interventions for CP should be based on the strongest possible scientific evidence for benefit and should have the smallest possible risk of harm. In the US, early intervention (EI) is a system of services available under the age of 3, to support infants and toddlers with developmental problems and their families as they interact with and care for their child.