Monday, April 4, 2011

Where did Cerebral Palsy Come From?

Where did Cerebral Palsy Come From?
In the 1860s, 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, in their arms. These children had difficulty grasping objects, crawling, and walking. Unlike most other diseases that affect the brain, this condition didn’t get worse as the children grew older.  Instead, their disabilities stayed relatively the same. 
The disorder, which was called Little's disease for many years, is now known as spastic diplegia. It is one of a group of disorders that affect the control of movement and are gathered under the umbrella term of “cerebral palsy.”      

What is Cerebral Palsy?
Doctors use the term cerebral palsy to refer to any one of a number of neurological disorders that appear in infancy or early childhood and permanently affect body movement and muscle coordination but aren’t progressive, in other words, they don’t get worse over time.  The term cerebral refers to the two halves or hemispheres of the brain, in this case to the motor area of the brain’s outer layer (called the cerebral cortex), the part of the brain that directs muscle movement; palsy refers to the loss or impairment of motor function.    
Even though cerebral palsy affects muscle movement, it isn’t caused by problems in the muscles or nerves.  It is caused by abnormalities inside the brain that disrupt the brain’s ability to control movement and posture.
In some cases of cerebral palsy, the cerebral motor cortex hasn’t developed normally during fetal growth.  In others, the damage is a result of injury to the brain either before, during, or after birth.  In either case, the damage is not repairable and the disabilities that result are permanent.      
Information found at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders & Stroke

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

this has nothing to do with th question...where did cerebral palsy come from

Unknown said...

I noticed that exact same thing..
My guess I's that some industrial pollutant has not been put under the microscope properly and that prior to the industrial revolution these groups of disorders would not have existed yet.

Unknown said...

I believe almost all neurological disease is
catalysed by poisoning of the brain by enviormental toxins. For years we thought lead and mercury were safe..these days we know the truth
So how many other heavy metal or petrochemical substances are floating around in our systems gradually effecting the genome and creating inherited diseases ?
Lots.
Almost infetestimal numbers of substances which were never meant to enter the human body are running rife with our personal well-being. The great irony is that modern allopathic medicine does not acknowledge that these toxins are the root cause and its methods of producing treatments unfortunately reflect this I.e.interests of commerce are put well before the integrity of producing medicines which pure, effective and free of the damaging health effects normally attributable to toxins and chemicals. The medical establishment should stick to what it I'd best at : prohressive diagnostic method. And treatment should be the domain of progressive research into age-old traditional remedies

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