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In the fall of 1999, I met a student who had a disability called cerebral palsy. I had never before seen anything like it in my life. By the time we were ready to graduate, Jameson Hilliard had become my friend. But in many ways I still did not know much about why he could not use his left hand or his left leg very well.
The history of cerebral palsy started:
In the 1860’s an English surgeon named William Little wrote the first medical descriptions of a puzzling disorder that struck children in the first years of life, causing stiff, spastic muscles in their legs and, to a lesser degree, their arms. These children had difficulty grasping objects, crawling, and walking. They did not get better as they grew up not did they become worse. Their condition, which was called Little’s Disease for many years, is now known as spastic dyslexia. It is just one of several disorders that affect control of movement and are grouped together under the term cerebral palsy. (Borowitz, 2003, pg. 2)
Cerebral palsy (CP), is a term used to express a type of chronic movement and or posture disorders, and is a condition that affects 4,500 infants and young children each year (Borowitz, 2002, p.1). It is not co
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Other causes of cerebral palsy not associated with brain trauma include illness during pregnancy, premature delivery, or lack of oxygen supply to the baby.
Somewhere around 10 to 20 percent of children with CP are not born with the condition but acquire it during or after birth. It is also not "curable" in the accepted sense, although education, therapy and applied technology can help persons with cerebral palsy lead productive lives. Services for the school age child may include continuing therapy, regular or special education, counseling, technical support, community integration opportunities, recreation and possibly personal attendants. Other causes may be associated with premature birth, RH or A-B-O blood type incompatibility between parents, infection of the mother with German measles or other viral diseases in early pregnancy, and microorganisms that attack the newborn s central nervous system. Doctors can make the child more comfortable with wheelchairs, canes or helmets, but they cannot cure the condition (Borowitz, 2002). Finally, compared with the number of infants born by cesarean section for fetal distress, there are simply not enough infants born in the most vulnerable weight groups to make any impact on even a minimal improvement of outcome in the group delivered by cesarean section for presumed fetal distress. It is not a disease and should never be referred to as such. Chief among the causes is an insufficient amount of oxygen or poor flow of blood reaching the fetal or newborn brain. ELBW could determine the individual and combined prognostic effects of bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), ultrasonographic signs of brain injury, and severe retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) on 18-month outcomes of ELBW infants (Stallings, 2002).
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