Longitudinal development of hand function in children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy aged 18 months to 12 years

Abstract

The AHA at 18 months may be used to make a crude prediction of future development.

Development of bimanual performance in young children with cerebral palsy

“…1,2 Despite limited manual abilities among all CP subgroups, development of hand function over time is scarcely explored. 1,2 Despite limited manual abilities among all CP subgroups, development of hand function over time is scarcely explored.…”

Assisting Hand Assessment and Children's Hand-Use Experience Questionnaire –Observed Versus Perceived Bimanual Performance in Children with Unilateral Cerebral Palsy

“…The lack of published research into the psychometric prop-erties of the adolescents' version of AHA might be considered a limitation as might be the time lag that accompanied the AHA and CHEQ data collection. AHA results are assumed to be rather stable in this age range, and only minor changes are noted as long as AHA is not administered explicitly to assess treatment effects (Holmefur et al, 2010;Nordstrand, 2015). The reliability of CHEQ is good but so far no data are available on the development of CHEQ over time (Amer et al, 2015).…”

“…Both assessments were administered in arbitrary order for practical reasons. The time between assessments could vary by approximately 3 months as hand function is expected to be rather stable in this age group (Nordstrand, 2015;Nordstrand and Eliasson, 2013). All children had contact with local rehabilitation services, which provide no or at most one occupational therapy session per month for this age group.…”

Longitudinal studies of development are good – but what are they good for?

“…1 In order to facilitate motor learning, action observation therapy typically relies on repeated phases of observation of goal-directed actions followed by their execution. This network of specialized neurons, that discharge either when performing or observing an action, is mainly distributed in the human premotor and parietal cortex.…”

“…1 Consequently, a majority of children with unilateral CP might be expected to respond to action observation. In the action observation group, children were repeatedly provided with the opportunity to imitate the motor tasks shown by their parents; whereas those in the control group repeated identical goal-directed tasks for the same time, without the opportunity to imitate their parents.…”