What complications can cerebral palsy cause?

  When we see children with cerebral palsy in our lives, we often see them with symptoms such as drooling, crooked eyes and mental retardation, which are actually complications of cerebral palsy. So what are the complications of cerebral palsy? The following experts will tell us the complications of cerebral palsy as follows: 1. Language disorders: about 30-60 children have different degrees of language disorders. The main manifestations are delayed language development, difficulty in pronunciation, unclear composition, inability to speak in sentences, and inability to express their own meaning correctly, and some children have complete aphasia.  2. Visual impairment: About 25-50% of the children have visual impairment, the most common being intraocular strabismus and refractive error, such as myopia, amblyopia and strabismus. A few have nystagmus, and occasionally total blindness.  3.Low intelligence: About 2/3 of the children are backward in intelligence, about 1/4 of them are severely backward in intelligence, and the intelligence of spastic quadriplegia and ankylosing cerebral palsy is even worse. It is rare for children with tardive dyskinesia to have severely low intelligence.  4. Sensory and cognitive abnormalities: Children with cerebral palsy often have tactile, positional, solid, and two-point discrimination sensory deficits. Children with cerebral palsy often lack correct visual-spatial and three-dimensional sensation, and their cognitive deficits are more prominent. Children with palsy have poor recognition of complex shapes and cannot distinguish the relationship between the shape of objects and the spatial context in which they are located, and have poor color recognition.  About 25% of children with cerebral palsy have weakness in sucking, difficulty in swallowing and chewing, poor lip closure, frequent salivation, and some have dental caries or underdeveloped teeth.  The most common deformities of the upper limbs are: shoulder joint inversion, internal rotation, elbow flexion, forearm rotation, wrist flexion, thumb flexion or inversion and finger flexion, etc. The common deformities of the lower limbs are: pelvic tilt, acetabular dysplasia, hip dislocation or subluxation, hip inversion, hip flexion, etc. The common lower limb deformities include: pelvic tilt, hip socket dysplasia, hip dislocation or subluxation, hip inversion, hip flexion and internal rotation, knee flexion, knee inversion, knee valgus, patellar dislocation or subluxation, foot drop, foot valgus, foot inversion, horseshoe foot deformity, claw toe deformity, scoliosis and abnormal vertebral body morphology, etc.  8, developmental delay: most of the children have backward physical development, malnutrition, and due to low immune function, often susceptible to respiratory infectious diseases. Children with cerebral palsy often have learning and social difficulties due to single or multiple defects in body movement, sensory, intelligence, language, emotion and behavior. Usually, the motor impairment of children with cerebral palsy interacts with the above-mentioned coexisting deficits, and the intellectual impairment aggravates the language impairment. A lot of experimental and clinical data show that when the limbic system of the brain, especially the hippocampal gyrus, is damaged, it can cause emotional abnormalities in children. The children often show signs of crying, capriciousness, stubbornness, isolation, eccentricity, emotional fragility, excitement, and some have a sense of pleasure and emotional instability, and it is more common in children with tardive dyskinesia. In addition, most children with cerebral palsy show excessive activity, distraction, and disorganized behavior. Occasionally, children with cerebral palsy are seen to use their hands to hit their heads and jaws and other self-injurious “compulsive” behaviors.  It is important to understand that these are not single problems that can be solved by medication alone, but may also affect the child’s intelligence. We should follow the principle of “early detection and early treatment” in the treatment of cerebral palsy, so that the child can integrate into society as early as possible.