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Symptom Recognition and Diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy in Nepal

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Abstract

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common movement disorder of childhood. Parents recognized the symptoms of CP at mean age of 13 months. However there was a mean delay of going to a doctor by 23 months and the mean age of diagnosis was 5½ years. Less than half of the CP children were diagnosed by a pediatrician and were receiving treatment methods with weak evidence base of efficacy. Delay in recognition of symptoms and help seeking due to lack of awareness and access to proper medical care and prevalent false beliefs were the leading reason for late diagnosis of CP in Nepal and thus children loose valuable time for intervention in their early developmental stage.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Batuk Prasad Rajbhandari, the chairman of Self-help Group for Cerebral Palsy (SGCP), Nepal for his lifelong contribution to uplifting children with cerebral palsy in Nepal. The CEO of SGCP, Nepal Mr. Bimal Lal Shrestha deserves equal credit for his encouragement for preparation of this work. I would like to thank all the staffs of SGCP for their dedicated work in the service of children and parents of children affected with CP and other neurological diseases. Any medical or paramedical work done in SGCP would be incomplete without expressing gratitude towards Professor Gunter Gross Selbeck, senior physiotherapist Claudia Selbeck, Dr. Birgit Fritzweiler  and Professor Ranendra PB Shrestha who laid the foundation of rational scientific knowledge about Cerebral Palsy in SGCP. I especially express my gratitude to Prof. Gunter for sharing the gems of knowledge  which cannot be learnt from any books but only be recieved from years of learned experiences. Also, I would like to share credits with my wife Dr. Gunjan Bisht Thapa who has been a constant source of inspiration to me for doing this work and without whose constant nagging this would not have been completed in time.

Author Contributions

The author collected and tabulated all the data from the records of the institute. The author then analyzed the data and wrote the paper after extensive literature review. The paper was then shown to a few experts from this field and their feedback was incorporated into the final manuscript.

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  1. Self-help Group for Cerebral Palsy, Lalitpur, Nepal

    Ritesh Thapa

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Ethical Approval

This is an observational study and neither has nor intends any intervention in the study. All interviewees were mentally competent individuals and no interventions were performed. Respondents were given verbal information about the study and invited to participate with their willing consent.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. The study protocol was approved and ethical clearance was received by from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Self-help Group for Cerebral Palsy.

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Thapa, R. Symptom Recognition and Diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy in Nepal. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 1739–1748 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3090-8

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