Predicting treatment outcomes for children with cerebral palsy
Constraint therapy can be an effective way for some children with cerebral palsy to regain movement in a spastic limb. However, this therapy can be a difficult experience that does not provide a beneficial outcome for all children.
Ravi Menon, PhD, has discovered that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be an effective tool to predict which patients will likely benefit from the treatment. Menon is a professor with the Department of Medical Biophysics, director of the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping at Robarts Research Institute and Canada Research Chair in Functional and Molecular Imaging.
The study published in the Journal of Child Neurology, involved seven children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy and showed that children with more compromised networks and tracts in their brains displayed the most improvement following constraint therapy.
The researchers hope that this initial study will lead to a larger multi-centred trial that will prove their findings on a larger scale. “If it turns out to be a viable experiment on a larger scale, then this is something that could be done clinically to predict outcomes of constraint therapy relatively easily,” said Menon.
