Can cerebral palsy be hereditary or not?

  Here we need to explain whether cerebral palsy is hereditary or not? This is a question that has confused many people. Many parents are confused when they learn that their child has cerebral palsy, saying that there is no one in their family who has had cerebral palsy, so why would their child have cerebral palsy? In clinical studies, doctors have found that only a very small number of children with cerebral palsy have a family history of cerebral palsy, which does not indicate that cerebral palsy is hereditary.  Therefore, cerebral palsy is not a hereditary disease, but again, the absence of cerebral palsy in a previous generation does not rule out the possibility of cerebral palsy in the next generation. The possible causes of cerebral palsy that are known to us are complex and varying. In fact, any factor that causes ischemia, hypoxia, injury or poisoning to the fetal and neonatal brain tissue can cause irreversible brain damage and lead to cerebral palsy, so we need to pay attention to it.  It is confirmed that rehabilitation training is effective for children with cerebral palsy, especially when they are young, but since this is a long term training that needs to be adhered to, the effect is slow, so I hope parents can be patient and insist on doing it, all for the future of the child. Surgery is one of the necessary treatments for cerebral palsy, which can make up for the lack of non-surgical treatment and create more favorable conditions for post-operative rehabilitation. Its main function is to release muscle spasm, balance muscle strength, correct deformity, adjust negative gravity line of limbs and improve motor function.  In the process of treating many children with cerebral palsy in our hospital, we have learned one thing: there should be a set of detailed preoperative clinical evaluation for each patient’s different condition, and we should select the appropriate operation for individualized treatment.  We should also keep in mind that surgery can solve some problems that cannot be solved by other treatments, but surgery has strict indications and not all cerebral palsy patients can be treated with FSPR surgery. The better the indication for surgery, the better the surgical outcome.  FSPR was developed based on SPR. Initially, in the process of using SPR to treat children with cerebral palsy, we realized that the surgical resection was extensive, traumatic, bleeding, and complications, which could easily lead to muscle weakness and aggravation of horseshoe foot, so we started to try to improve the surgical instruments, surgical ideas and clinical anatomy, and created the functional selective posterior spinal nerve root dissection (i.e., FSPR) procedure.  It is worth mentioning that FSPR only selectively blocks part of the posterior nerve root fibers without affecting the anterior nerve roots that innervate muscle movement and motor function. The specific site of surgery can depend on the patient’s specific condition: surgery in the lumbar spine can address lower extremity spasticity, and surgery in the cervical spine can address upper extremity spasticity, which is more applicable to patients with spastic cerebral palsy.  By severing the posterior spinal nerve roots during FSPR surgery, muscle tone can be significantly reduced, but the operation does not cause paralysis in the child. A very small number of children may experience transient abnormalities of urination and defecation, which are caused by intraoperative stimulation of the spinal nerve and can be recovered after the operation. With a modified approach, spinal stability and force lines are not greatly affected.