Invited Review: ‘Cures for cerebral palsy’

We are pleased to share details of recent invited review that was published in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology. Following on from important discussions on the topic of ‘cures for cerebral palsy’ that begun during development of The Australian and New Zealand Cerebral Palsy Strategy, members from the Strategy Collaboration, in partnership with others, wrote a review on this topic.

This review combines perspectives gained during community consultation with those published in the scientific and other literature to understand whether ‘cures for cerebral palsy’ is a reasonable and appropriate goal for the field. These perspectives were framed through the lens of several ethical principles such as maintaining hope while also being realistic, sensitivity to sharply different viewpoints amongst people with disability and their families, societal attitudes and identity.

In summary,

There are a wide range of strong views on the topic of ‘cures for cerebral palsy’,
We propose a pluralized, symptom-based definition of ‘cures for cerebral palsy’, and
Ultimately ‘cures for cerebral palsy’ was determined by our Australasian collaborative to be a reasonable and appropriate goal for the field in the 2020s.

The full publication is available to read here.

Citation details: Honan, I., Finch-Edmondson, M., Imms, C., Novak, I., Hogan, A., Clough, S., Bonyhady, B., McIntyre, S., Elliott, C., Wong, S., Bink, M. and Badawi, N. (2021), Is the search for cerebral palsy ‘cures’ a reasonable and appropriate goal in the 2020s? Dev Med Child Neurol. https://doi.org/10.1111/dmcn.15016