Cerebral Palsy

The Royal Children’s Hospital treats more than 500 children with cerebral palsy every year at the Queensland Cerebral Palsy Health Service. The service also provides outreach clinics to major regional centres throughout Queensland and funds physiotherapy positions at four regional centres including Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton and Gold Coast in addition to physiotherapy and occupational therapy positions at the Mater Children’s Hospital.

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common childhood physical disability occurring in 1 in 500 young Australians each year. Research estimates that every 18 hours, a child is born with cerebral palsy in Australia.

Cerebral palsy is a complex and often highly debilitating condition that can place a huge strain on the health system, families and most of all, individuals with cerebral palsy. The costs associated with CP across a lifetime are in excess of $2 million per child.

How does the RCH Foundation help?

The Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation helped to start the Queensland Cerebral Palsy and Rehabilitation Research Centre after an anonymous donor generously contributed $1.82 million for CP research in late 2006.

Our research breakthroughs

This year, the Queensland Cerebral Palsy and Rehabilitation Research Centre moved one step closer to being able to use advanced brain imaging to help answer some of the most burning questions about how the brain injury occurs and evolves in babies and young children with cerebral palsy. In November 2009, the first MRI compatible incubator in the Southern Hemisphere will be delivered and will open new worlds for cerebral palsy research.

This year researchers recruited 120 Queensland families for the Queensland Cerebral Palsy Child study in order to examine the relationship between the nature and extent of a child’s original brain injury and how it affects their early motor, hip, feeding, language and cognitive development.

Researchers also completed the largest study internationally of novel ways to improve a child’s hand function by putting a special glove that constrains movement on a child’s good hand to encourage use of their hemiplegic hand (after a stroke or early brain injury).

Our hope for 2009-10 is:

• use the MRI compatible incubator to take brain images of Australia’s tiniest babies to better understand the nature of early brain injuries and link this to existing studies of children with cerebral palsy to plot possible development problems and intervene early with targeted therapies.
• understand the impact of cerebral palsy on bone density in adolescents and what link this has to the incidence of fractures, pain and physical activity.

Read more about our cerebral palsy research in our fact sheet.