This study tested the safety and effectiveness of a neuroscience-based, multi-component intervention designed to improve motor skills and sensory processing of the more-affected arm and hand in infants with CP where one side is more impacted than the other (asymmetric CP).
The American Academy of Pediatrics has updated its recommendations for Primary Care Providers to provide a "Medical Home" for children and youth with cerebral palsy. This comprehensive update gives primary care pediatricians the guidance they need to address the many needs that children and youth with CP experience and coordinate care across disciplines. The Cerebral Palsy Foundation has created a checklist to help guide you in raising your child with CP to living the healthiest life possible and ensure that you and your pediatrician are addressing all of your concerns.
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.
I have cerebral palsy spastic diplegia. So it affects my legs and sometimes my fine motor skills. I walk with two canes. I do things a little slower, but I get things done.
Oropharyngeal dysphagia, or OPD, is an impairment of the oral or pharyngeal phases of the swallow. This can impair muscle movements and coordination of the mouth, such as the lips, tongue, jaw, cheeks, palate, and also muscles of the pharynx and the entry to the airway.
As a parent, when it comes to different types of interventions for infants with cerebral palsy, how do you know what you have, what you don't, and what you could get?
Exploration for an infant means discovering anything about that environment. If that infant needs an opportunity to be brought to them, that's okay. Let an infant explore through their senses, whether it's touch, or smell, or taste, or sight, or hearing.
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.
As a physician and researcher, I skeptically looked forward to learning more about mindfulness practice, because there is evidence it helps with stress management, self-regulation, focus, productivity and happiness. As a mom, I felt that weird mix of guilt that I was going to focus on “not-my-children” for a whole day, excited anticipation and anxiety that maybe I would be a complete failure at this. It turns out all the mental baggage I took into the workshop was the exact opposite of what mindfulness tries to achieve. The daily practice has since changed my life.
PTSD can be common in parents after a child with Cerebral Palsy has left the NICU. One of the hardest days of my life as a NICU parent was not what I would have expected it to be. It was the day I went home without my baby, after spending every waking moment since my emergency C-section by his incubator. I never knew I had a dream about what it would be like to have a baby until that dream was taken away.