Infants at high risk of cerebral palsy:Neuromotor characteristics and the effect of the early intervention programme COPCA

Worldwide, over 140 million babies are born each year. Most of them are healthy and will develop typically, but some infants are at risk of neurodevelopmental disorders like cerebral palsy. The primary aim of this thesis was to enhance the identification of infants at risk of cerebral palsy (CP) and to improve prediction of future neurodevelopment. To this end, we first reviewed the literature on the predictive value of specific neurological signs in high-risk infants (chapter 2). Next, we explored possible relationships between slow pupillary light responses and type of brain lesion and developmental outcome (chapter 3). We analyzed knee jerk responses by means of surface electromyography (EMG) in both healthy newborns and high-risk infants (chapter 4), and we investigated whether the development of knee jerk responses was associated with a specific type of brain lesion or diagnosis of CP (chapter 5). Furthermore, we evaluated whether specific movement characteristics could enhance the predictive power of definitely abnormal general movements (GMs; chapter 6 and 7). Our secondary aim was to investigate the effect of the early intervention programme COPCA (COPing with and CAring for infants with special needs – a family centred programme) in infants identified as being at risk of CP. We presented the follow-up data of the VIP project (Dutch: Vroegtijdig Interventie Project, chapter 8) and the research design of the LEARN2MOVE 0-2 (L2M 0-2) years study (chapter 9)