BACKGROUND Cerebral palsy causes motor impairments during development and many children may experience excessive neural and mechanical muscle stiffness. The clinical assumption is that excessive stiffness is thought to be one of the main reasons for functional impairments in cerebral palsy. As such, passive stretching is widely used to reduce stiffness, with a view to improving function. Howeve...

Introduction: Muscle strength is one of the most important and effective factors in movement disordersof spastic diplegic children with cerebral palsy. Respecting the fact that strength can influence gross motorfunctions, the aim of this study was to measure the effects of loaded sit-to-stand resistance exercises onsuch functions in this group of children with cerebral palsy. Materi...

Multi-segment foot kinematics were compared between idiopathic toe walkers (ITW) and typically developing children (TD) during toe walking and also compared to children with mild diplegic cerebral palsy (CP) who toe walked. Where possible, heel-toe walking was also compared between ITW and TD children. Significant differences were found between the ITW and TD groups during both toe walking and ...

Deficits in Task-Specific Modulation of Anticipatory Postural Adjustments in 1 Individuals with Spastic Diplegic Cerebral Palsy 2 3 Hidehito Tomita, Yoshiki Fukaya, Tomomi Ueda, Shota Honma, Eriya Yamashita, 4 Yoshiji Yamamoto, Etsuko Mori, and Katsuyoshi Shionoya 5 6 1 Department of Physical Therapy, Toyohashi SOZO University, Toyohashi, Japan 7 2 Aichi Prefectural Hospital and Rehabilitation ...

This study compared the effects of solid and hinged ankle-foot orthoses (AFOs) on the gait of children with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy (CP) who ambulate with excessive ankle plantar flexion during stance. Twelve children with spastic diplegic CP wore no AFOs for an initial 2-week period, solid AFOs for 1 month, no AFOs for 2 weeks, and hinged AFOs for 1 month. Lower extremity muscle timing...

This paper describes a method to characterize gait pathologies like cerebral palsy using work, energy, and angular momentum. For a group of 24 children, 16 with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy and 8 typically developed, kinematic data were collected at the subjects self selected comfortable walking speed. From the kinematics, the work-internal, external, and whole body; energy-rotational and re...