Aboelnasr E.1,2, Hegazy F.3, Altalawy H.1
1Cairo University, Faculty of Physical Therapy, Physical Therapy for Paediatrics, Cairo, Egypt, 2Sharjah Social Affairs, Government of Sharjah, Physiotherapy, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 3University of Sharjah, Physiotherapy, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Background: Practitioners need more sensitive measure to quantify reaching movement for judgment of the treatment effects and reflecting the degrees of motor impairment in upper extremities.
Purpose: The purposes of this study were to differentiate between spastic and normal reaching using three dimension kinematic analysis and to quantify the interference of spasticity on reaching movement in children with congenital hemiplegic cerebral palsy.
Methods: Fifteen children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (CP) as a study group and fifteen normal typically developing children as control group were studied. Participants were asked to reach forward at a self-selected pace toward one target at a normalized distance. Motion analysis system was used to record the trajectory of reaching performance. Kinematic parameters were computed and analyzed.
Results: There were significant differences between the normal and spastic reaching (P 0.001). Hemiplegic CP demonstrated slower and less smooth (higher normalized jerk score and more movement units) than typically developing children group, this reflects feedback guidance to correct spatial inaccuracy of reaching in hemiplegic CP.
Conclusion(s): Kinematic analysis quantifies reaching characteristics and provides objective information about the motor strategies associated with goal-oriented tasks.
Implications: Three dimensional kinematic analysis can be used to differentiate between the pathological (CP) and the normal performance during functional reaching task. This study also identified the ability of kinematic analysis to give valuable objective assessment of upper extremity function and assess the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions used to improve movement pattern.
Funding acknowledgements: NA
Topic: Human movement analysis
Ethics approval: This study was approved by the research ethical committee in the Faculty of Physical Therapy, Cairo University, on Sept. 2012.
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
