A Small-step Program for Development of New Treatment Principles for Children With Cerebral Palsy and Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Rational for subject selection: Signs of CP may be visible already during the first months, but according to recommendations the diagnosis of CP should typically not be made until 2-4 years of age. The reason is that the individual developmental trajectories of muscle tone, postural control and motor function vary considerably during the first two years. A child with a late development may recover and atypical signs may disappear, and opposite, CP may develop although there have been no early signs. Thus, there is a dilemma in that it is too late to wait with early intervention until the CP diagnosis has been made. In this project we are addressing this problem by developing criteria for infants with high risk to develop CP based on early signs of atypical motor development and on perinatal risk factors. That means that we will include both infants who will get and infants who will not get the CP diagnosis. Children who are not meeting the criteria of CP at 2 years of age will be excluded from the analysis. The investigators assume that the intervention will influence the course of development and help the children to function at a higher level, but not that the intervention will "cure" CP and prevent later diagnosis. Infants with increased risk to develop CP will be recruited in this project.

The study group will be recruited from infants exposed to increased perinatal risk factors, such as preterm birth, hypoxia, infections, retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) chronic lung disease and heart insufficiency, small for gestational age, hypoxic ischemic insult and morphological brain abnormalities. These children commonly participate in a clinical follow up programme at the children's hospital with regular examinations at 3months. The high-risk preterm infants that at follow up examinations exhibit a delayed psycho-motor development or display clinical signs of abnormal neurology will be recruited. Recruitment will also include children below 8 months, demonstrating delayed psycho-motor development or clinical signs of abnormal neurology referred to the physiotherapy department from child neurologists at the hospital.

Randomisation The aim is to include 40 children in the study group with neurodevelopmental disorder to reach sufficient power in the study. This number is high but the investigators expect that about 50% will not fulfil the diagnose criteria at 2 years of age based on previous experience from intervention studies. The aim is to include 20 children with CP, which is a reasonable approximation of study population size to reach sufficient power. The children will be allocated to group by block randomisation. The intervention group (n=20) will take part in a newly developed Small-Step-Program. The comparison group (n=20) will continue their ordinary follow up programme. Stratification will be used to control for gestational age (preterm<37 and term>37 week). Children in the Small-Step-Program" will be further randomised to start with the mobility step or hand use step.

Rational for second randomisation Our hypothesis is that the trained step will improve, while the non-trained step will result in minor changes and that children in the control group will have a continuous developmental pace. The randomised steps are hand use and mobility.

The children in both groups will be assessed at four occasions, at start (first examination), after 12 weeks (second examination) and after 30 weeks (third examination) as well as at 2 years of age (fourth examination). For children in the study group there will be 3 additional times for assessments in order to investigate the second hypothesis. Parents in both groups will be asked to fill in questionnaires' at all four examinations. Both parents will be asked to fill out the questionnaires.