Cerebral palsy is a general term for non-progressive disorders of movement and posture resulting from damage to the brain in the later months of pregnancy, during birth, in the newborn period or in early child years. It is a term used to describe a group of chronic disorders impairing control of movement that appear in the first few years of life and generally do not worsen over time.

The term "Cerebral" refers to the brain or the cerebrum which is the upper part of the brain. "Palsy" refers to paralysis of any muscle often times involving involuntary tremors and loss of control of movement. Cerebral palsy involves damage or irregular development of the brain that affects the brain's ability to control the body's muscles, movement and posture.

There are varying degrees of Cerebral Palsy. Minor motors skills like writing or some speech may be the only thing affected. To the other extreme, the ability to ever walk or do even the simplest tasks for one's self may never be achieved. The symptoms and problems differ from person to person. It should be noted that Cerebral Palsy does not always cause a severe debilitating handicap. Cerebral palsy is not contagious and it is not typically inherited down the family line.

What Are the Different Forms?

There are four categories of Cerebral palsy. They are: spastic, athetoid, ataxic, and mixed forms.

Spastic cerebral palsy:

Spastic paralysis deals with abnormal stiffness and contraction of groups of muscles. This form of cerebral palsy affects 70 to 80 percent of patients. There are three major classifications in the Spastic group. The names describe which limbs are affected. The names given to these types combine the suffix "plegia" which means paralyzed or weak.

1. Diplegia: all four limbs are affected, the legs mores severely than the arms.
2. Hemiplegia: the limbs on only one side of the body are affected, and the arm is usually worse than the leg. Individuals with spastic hemiparesis may also experience hemiparetic tremors, in which uncontrollable shaking affects the limbs on one side of the body.
3. Quadriplegia: all four limbs are severely affected and not necessarily symmetrically.

Athetosis is another major category. Uncontrolled, slow, writhing movements characterize this form of cerebral palsy. The hands are usually affected, as with the feet, arms, or legs. Sometimes the muscles of the face and tongue are affected which may cause drooling. Dysarthria is a condition that affects the muscles needed for speech. Athetoid cerebral palsy affects about 10 to 20 percent of cerebral palsy patients.

Ataxic cerebral palsy:

Atoxia is the form that affects coordination, the sense of balance and depth perception. It is more rare than the other forms. Its characteristics usually affect the patient's ability to walk. Affected individuals walk unsteadily with a wide-based gait, placing their feet unusually far apart; and experience difficulty when attempting quick or precise movements, such as writing or buttoning a shirt. They may also have intention tremor. In this form of tremor, beginning a voluntary movement, such as reaching for a book, causes a trembling that affects the body part being used and that worsens as the individual gets nearer to the desired object. Ataxia affects an estimated 5 to 10 percent of cerebral palsy patients.

Mixed forms:

It is common for patients to have symptoms of more than one of the previous three categories. The most common mixed form includes spasticity and athetoid movements, but other combinations are also possible.

Mental impairment:

• 1/3 of children with cerebral palsy are mildly intellectually impaired
• 1/3 are moderately or severely impaired
• 1/3 are intellectually normal.

Seizures or epilepsy

As many as half of all children with cerebral palsy have seizures. During a seizure, the normal pattern of electrical activity in the brain is disrupted by uncontrolled bursts of electricity. When seizures recur without a direct trigger, such as fever, the condition is called epilepsy.

In the person who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy, this disruption may be spread throughout the brain and cause varied symptoms all over the body (as in tonic-clonic seizures) or may be confined to just one part of the brain and cause more specific symptoms (as in partial seizures).

Partial seizures are classified as simple or complex. In simple partial seizures, the individual has localized symptoms, such as muscle twitches, chewing movements and numbness or tingling. In complex partial seizures, the individual may hallucinate, stagger, perform automatic and purposeless movements, or experience impaired consciousness or confusion.

Impaired vision or hearing:

A large number of children with cerebral palsy have strabismus. Strabismus is a condition where there is a difference in the left and right eye muscles, which results in a misalignment. It may cause double vision. If the affected person is young enough, the brain may adapt to the condition.

Surgery may be recommended as a treatment:

Children with hemiparesis may have hemianopia, which is defective vision or blindness that impairs the normal field of vision of one eye. For example, when hemianopia affects the right eye, a child looking straight ahead might have perfect vision except on the far right. In homonymous hemianopia, the impairment affects the same part of the visual field of both eyes.

Impaired hearing is also a frequent disorder that accompanies cerebral palsy. Some children with cerebral palsy have impaired ability to feel simple sensations like touch and pain. They may also have stereognosia, or difficulty perceiving and identifying objects using the sense of touch.

What Causes Cerebral Palsy?

In over 90% of the cases the damage occurs before or at birth. Probably the most common cause is cerebral hypoxia or poor oxygen supply to the brain. A maternal infection spreading to the baby within the uterus is an occasional cause. A rare cause is kernicterus, which results from an excess of bilirubin (bile pigment) in babies with hemolytic disease of the newborn. The bile pigment damages the basal ganglia or the nerve cell clusters in the brain. Possible birth causes include trauma during delivery, head injury, encephalitis or meningitis.

About 10 to 20 percent of children who have cerebral palsy acquire the disorder after birth. Acquired cerebral palsy results from brain damage in the first few months or years of life and often follows brain infections, such as bacterial meningitis or viral encephalitis, or results from head injury -- most often from a motor vehicle accident, a fall, or child abuse.

Congenital cerebral palsy, on the other hand, is present at birth, although it may not be detected for several months. In most cases, the cause of congenital cerebral palsy is unknown.

Some of these causes of congenital cerebral palsy include:

• Infections during pregnancy.
• German measles, or rubella, is caused by a virus that can infect pregnant women and, therefore, the fetus in the uterus, to cause damage to the developing nervous system.
• Other infections that can cause brain injury in the developing fetus include cytomegalovirus and toxoplasmosis.
• Jaundice in the infant.

Rh incompatibility:

In this blood condition, the mother's body produces immune cells called antibodies that destroy the fetus's blood cells, leading to a form of jaundice in the newborn.