Special Needs
Cerebal palsy and tone issues...I have questions????
Hi,
my LO is 8 months and was just diagnosed with mild CP and low tone in his mid-line and high tone in his right arm. He's delayed about 4 months or so. He has all of this b/c of lack of oxygen due to the doctors not being able to intubate him fast enough. Anyways, I just wanted to see if anyone had any information, help,suggestions on how to really help my LO and what low/high tone really means. thanks
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Re: Cerebal palsy and tone issues...I have questions????
Does your LO go to physical therapy? They would be able to help your LO work on gross motor skills that might be delayed due to high/low tone. Has your LO been to an orthopedist? They can recommend shoes or possibly braces.
low tone (hypotonia) would be described as very floppy, loose muscles. High tone (hypertonia) would be described as very tight, hard to stretch, rigid muscles.
A physical therapist and possibly an occupational therapist (for the arm/hand) will be able to help your baby best.
They will incorporate excercises to strengthen those weak muscles and stretching/massage to facilitate more fluid movement in his arm.
Contact your local Early Intervention program. Your child should be eligible for some free PT and OT with a cerebral palsy diagnosis. IF you have limited EI services in your area, have your pediatrician write you a script for PT and search your insurance book for a local PT.
Tone is the way the muscles fire. My son (spastic quad CP) is hypertonic in all limbs (more on the right side though), hypotonic in his core. So basically his brain is telling the muscles of his limbs to fire even when there is no call for it. Does that make sense? I describe it to people like when you get the shivers and you can't stop your muscles from doing it...that's high tone. Except it happens all the time. Low tone is the opposite. In order to get functional movement, our LO's have to learn how to relax the muscles that are hypertonic and not to use the tone to accomplish the goal.
With the hypertonia in his right arm, is your LO's right hand is fisted most of the time? My DS is much higher tone on his right side so we have a splint for him to wear to open his hand...it reduces the tone considerably. We also have AFO's for him to wear when he is standing/walking. Proper positioning, stretching, massage....all those things help to loosen his muscles so we can get functional movement out of him. We've taken him to a therapy pool (89 degrees! Anything colder and he seizes up) to work with him as well! And repetition, repetition, repetition! If a typically developing child needs to repeat something 5000 times to "learn" it, our children typically need to repeat it about 15,000 times for their muscles to learn how to perform a task.
EI probably won't alter anything based on the diagnosis. You may want to ask about adding OT though to work on fine motor skills. We saw a big difference once we added OT.
Good luck!