A Little Bit of History and Defining Cerebral Palsy

Cerebral Palsy (CP) has been a recognized disorder since the 1860’s when William Little first documented it, and effective scientific research since the early 1900’s has provided many advancements. Yet, Cerebral Palsy is still very difficult to define because many conditions are grouped under this one category. In fact, the definition has not changed much since about 1950. The current definition for CP is: "An umbrella term covering a group of non-progressive, but often changing, motor impairment syndromes secondary to lesions or anomalies of the brain arising in the early stages of development"(1).

So, the general requirements used to classify something as Cerebral Palsy are:

• Muscle movement difficulty—as palsy implies—due to a brain-based (cerebral) problem
• Occurring early in life
• Non-progressive, meaning the motor impairment is not degenerative due to the CP itself. However, progressive here does not mean recurrent, since people with CP do have repeated impairment, which may account for some of the debilitating conditions that are often mistakenly termed as progressive.

More specifically, CP is classified into athetosic or spastic forms. And further, since the spastic form is more common, it is broken down into four subgroups: monoplegia, diplegia, hemiplegia, and quadriplegia. The terms dyskinetic and ataxic refer to the least common, but still observed forms of CP.

Since having the same general criteria for diagnosing a disease as CP is so important, especially for research studies, a specific list (1) of known diseases and whether or not they are included as CP has been developed. For example, brain tumors, Spina bifida, and Down syndrome are not considered to be forms of CP, while Congenital rubella syndrome and Corpus straitum syndrome are.