I overheard our doctor say there are at least a dozen different ways kids with cerebral palsy walk. Whenever we are in the clinic with other parents and children, they all look pretty much the same to me. What are these differences?

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a neurologic disorder caused by damage to the developing brain. It can occur during pregnancy, during childbirth, or after birth up to about age five.

There are four major groups of CP: spastic, athetoid, ataxic, and mixed. Most children have the spastic type. Spastic CP is further broken down into three other types: hemiplegia, diplegia, and quadriplegia. These categories describe how much of the body is involved.

With hemiplegia, only one arm or one leg has been affected. Diplegia usually means both legs are affected. And quadriplegia refers to all four limbs but usually, the entire body is involved.

Muscle tightness and muscle spasticity are common with spastic CP. Jerking and waving of the arms and legs describes what you see with someone with athetoid CP. Ataxia looks more like someone who has been drinking too much.

With these four groups of CP, there can be a wide variety of gait (walking) patterns. Even with just spastic CP, video and motion analysis of body movements have identified up to 13 different gait styles.

It’s likely that general observation (just watching the children move around) won’t reveal these wide range of differences. Your physician was probably referring to results of studies of gait patterns among children with all kinds of CP.