Early diagnosis begins with a medical history and involves using neuroimaging, standardized neurological, and standardized motor assessments that indicate congruent abnormal findings indicative of cerebral palsy. Clinicians should understand the importance of prompt referral to diagnostic-specific early intervention to optimize infant motor and cognitive plasticity, prevent secondary complications, and enhance caregiver well-being.

We studied how common pain was thought to be due to muscle spasticity in the legs or arms is in children/adolescents with CP.

CPF Executive Director Rachel Byrne and Mary Gannotti, PhD, PT discuss pain across the lifespan in cerebral palsy.

Pain in people with cerebral palsy is very common, and probably not evaluated frequently enough.

A lot of people with cerebral palsy will experience pain over the course of their life. Through better assessment we can provide better interventions, which will lead to a better quality of life.

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.

There are so many different causes for potential pain that it can be hard to find the cause. If you have CP or are a parent of someone with CP it is really important to empower yourself with information on pain including what causes it and options for treatment. You need to work out what is causing the pain not just mask it with pain medication.

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.

Sleep is important to all of us, but it's especially important for infants. When infants go to sleep, they start to create neural networks about what they've been learning during the day. It's estimated that as many as one in five children with disabilities have a sleep disorder, and that's higher than the rate of typically-developing children. Finding sleep interventions for these children is incredibly important so they can lay down their brain networks and continue to learn during their early childhood years.