Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a disorder of movement and posture that appears during infancy or early childhood. It is caused by nonprogressive damage to the brain before, during, or shortly after birth. CP is not a single disease but a name given to a wide variety of static neuromotor impairment syndromes
occurring secondary to a lesion in the developing brain. The damage to the brain is permanent and cannot be cured but the consequences can be minimized. Progressive musculoskeletal pathology occurs in most affected children. The lesion in the brain may occur during the prenatal, perinatal, or postnatal periods. Any nonprogressive central nervous system (CNS) injury occurring during the first 2 years of life is considered to be CP. In addition to movement and balance disorders, patients might experience other manifestations of cerebral dysfunction. CP was first described by the English physician Sir Francis William Little in 1861 and was known as Little’s disease

for a long time. Little thought that this condition was caused by neonatal asphyxia. Later, Sigmund Freud and other scientists challenged Little’s idea and proposed that a variety of insults during pregnancy could damage the developing brain. Today, it is accepted that only approximately 10% of cases of CP can be attributed to neonatal asphyxia. The majority occur during the prenatal period, and in most of the cases, a specific cause cannot be identified.