Cerebral palsy surgery

A surgical treatment is not always necessary for all the cerebral palsy patients. However, the medical practitioners will recommend a cerebral palsy surgery for improving the muscle flexibility, correct contractures, and to reduce the spasticity in the legs. A cerebral palsy surgery generally involves pre-surgical and post-surgical care to the patients.

Cerebral palsy children will often walk on their toes, due to a tight heel cord. When other treatments like splints and braces fails to correct the problems, cerebral palsy surgery treatment becomes the only way to overcome the problem.

A cerebral palsy surgery treatment will help to correct it by lengthening the tendon and improves the ability to walk, body balancing, and prevent further deformities.

Surgical treatment is also helpful to get relief from Spasticity in the legs and hips of cerebral palsy children. The cerebral palsy surgery procedures involve the identification of sensory nerve fibers in the spinal cord, and selectively cutting the nerve fibers for reducing the spasticity.

Cerebral palsy surgery is often optional if the contractures are severe enough to be a reason for movement troubles. During the surgery the surgeons will lengthen the muscles tendons, which are proportionately shorter than required.

First of all, the surgeon must determine the faulty muscles to correct it. Lengthening the wrong muscle tendons could make the trouble worse. Finding the faulty muscle [which requires the correction] from the huge number of muscles is a difficult task.

A new method to locate the faulty muscles enables the surgeons to spot gait abnormalities, pinpoint problems of muscles, and divide real problems from compensation. This is known as gait analysis. Gait analysis requires cameras to record.

The muscle movements while walking and computers will analyze each and every portion of the patient's gait, force plates when feet touches the ground, and a special technique to identify the muscle activities (electromyography). With the help of these data, the doctors will be able to locate the faulty muscles and the real problem of cerebral palsy patient to move and balance the body.

The surgeon can conduct the cerebral palsy surgery treatment based on these details or data and they can use gait analysis method to check the cerebral palsy surgery results. The lengthening of muscle tendons will make the muscle weak and the cerebral palsy surgery for contractures will normally take months for recovery.

Due to this reason, the surgeons will try to do the surgical treatments for many muscles in one surgery if it is possible. If the patient requires more than one surgical procedure, the surgical treatments will be scheduled very close to one another.

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