Symptoms

The symptoms of cerebral palsy are not seen until after early infancy, but they become more obvious as the infant’s nervous system develops. These signs include:

  • Persistence of infantile reflexes, which normally disappear after 3-6 months after birth of the infant.
  • Children develop handedness before they age 18 months. This usually indicates that there is abnormal muscle on one side of the body, which itself is an early sign of CP.
  • Children with CP also late in developmental milestones such as controlling head, rolling over, sitting without support, crawling or walking.

Infants with CP have delayed developmental milestones unlike shown below, where this infants able to sit up and control his head.

  

 

Image courtesy of flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mileena/2730480076/ under the common creative license law

The more pronounced problems and disabilities occur later on in the child’s life. These problems range from mild to very severe.This severity is related to severity of damage to their brain.These problems include:

 

  • Mental retardation: Some individuals, usually ones that have a severe form of CP are usually affected by mental retardation.

 

  • Abnormal muscle tone: Individual may have their limbs held in awkward positions, such as spastic leg muscles may result in legs cross in a scissor like position. This is because of their muscle either being stiff (spastic) or unusually relaxed (floppy).

 Individual who suffers from more sevre form of CP.

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    Image courtesy of flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/charlieferrari/53100426/ under the common creative license law

  • Abnormal movements: CP affected individuals usually have jerky or abrupt and slow, writhing movements. This may make the movements uncontrolled.

 

  • Skeletal Deformities: People with CP may also have shortened limbs on the affected side.

 

  • Seizures: This may appear early or late in individuals affected with CP’s lives. Around one third of individuals with CP have this symptom.

 

  • Vision problems: Around three quarters of people with CP have strabismus. This means their eyes are usually turned in or turned out. This is due to the weak control of their eye muscles.

  

Image courtesy of flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beezee05/298283710/

under the common creative license law

  • Speech problems: Some individuals with CP have these problems as they are unable to control their muscles involved in speech such as muscles of the tongue, mouth and throat.

 

  • Swallowing problems: Individuals with CP also find such a complex action of swallowing which involves co-ordination of many different muscles extremely difficult. These problems include sucking eating, drinking and controlling their saliva. This may lead them to drool.

 

  • Hearing problems: It is also not unusual to find individuals with CP have a partial hearing loss.

 

  • Bowel and bladder control problems: These are again caused due the lack of muscle control.

 

  • Dental problems: Many CP sufferers tend to have cavities; this is due to deficit in tooth enamel and difficulty in cleaning teeth.

 

  • Joint problems: This may develop in spastic CP sufferers due to severe stiffening of the joints because of the different muscles exerting different tone and strength applying unequal pressure on the joints.