Life expectancy in children with cerebral palsy

EDITOR,—In their paper on life expectancy in children with cerebral palsy1 Jane L Hutton and colleagues remark on our findings in two selected studies,2 3 stating that our subjects with developmental disability seemed to have a much shorter life expectancy than they found. We studied people who had devastating learning disabilities as well as people with less severe disabilities. Some groups had a very poor prognosis—that is, those who were immobile, could not roll over, were tube fed, had …