2005 Volume 42 Issue 8 Pages 564-572
Cerebral palsy (CP) is a motor disorder that results from a nonprogressive brain lesion that occurs during prenatal or perinatal development. As motor function in patients with CP changes with brain development, it may be more suitable to make a quantitative evaluation during adulthood than childhood. But until now there has been little information available about adult CP. In this review, we investigate the clinical characteristics and ADL scores in adult CP patients from our series of clinical experience. From our previous study that assessed the clinical characteristics of adult CP using uniform scale, a population of adult CP patients showed markedly increased muscle tone and moderate muscle weakness. These two factors did not correlate with each other, and were independently responsible for worse ADL scores. Decreased functional ability and secondary muscloskeletal problems such as cervical spondylosis are common in adult CP patients. We therefore added a review of them such reports from the literatures.
