Perinatal factors that contribute to the prevalence of cerebral palsy in Townsville, North Queensland

[Extract] Cerebral palsy (CP) is an umbrella term which describes a group of disorders involving movement and posture causing activity limitations that can occur during fetal or infant brain development (Ferrari and Cioni, 2010). CP is the most common childhood physical disability and in 94% of children who acquire this disability, the brain injury occurs within the pre/perinatal period (Australian Cerebral Palsy Register Group, 2016). It is difficult to ascertain why the extremely preterm infant is at an increased risk of CP. Recent research has identified an increased survival of the extreme premature infant (Blencowe et al., 2012) and this could be related to advances in perinatal care, including the administration of antenatal steroids or magnesium sulphate, intrapartum antibiotics, delayed cord clamping, postnatal use of caffeine and therapeutic cooling (Badawi and Keogh, 2013). Advances in perinatal care specifically therapeutic cooling may have increased the survival of term infants and consequently, resulted in an increased number of term babies developing CP (Jacobs et al., 2013, Himmelmann and Uvebrant, 2014)