Infantile cerebral palsy cases with severe mental deficiency; relationship of etiology to type of neurologic syndrome.

This is a report of a study of 157 cases of infantile cerebral palsy planned to demonstrate the correlation of etiologic diagnosis with neurologic residua. The average mental level of the group as a whole is represented by an intelligence quotient of 25, indicating the restricted distribution of the clinical material. Birth trauma or postnatal central nervous system infections were found to be of etiologic importance in almost one third of the cases with asymmetric spastic involvement. On the other hand, these causative factors were not implicated in any of the hypotonic or ataxic group, nor in those spastic cases with symmetric involvement.