Cerebral Palsy | Determining Causes

How Cerebral Palsy Causes are Determined

Cerebral palsy in infants can be caused by many different events. In order to determine whether a child has CP and how they came to suffer the baby brain damage that leads to it, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists has very specific criteria. These criteria help the doctors to go back and see what may have brought about the injury.

Testing

The child has to be examined in several different ways. MRIs are among the most powerful diagnostic tools available to doctors and, to track where the injury originated and its nature, they use these to image the child's body and brain. This is one of the ways that they determine the cause of cerebral palsy. Doctors will also use various lab tests and determine from those tests what may have caused the injury. Examination of the child at the time of birth and an assessment of the exact type of CP that they're presenting with are also imperative toward determining the origin of the injury.

Negligence

There are cases where the doctor was negligent and when their actions—or inactions—resulted in the circumstances that ended up causing cerebral palsy in the newborn. IN these cases, a lawyer may be able to pursue a lawsuit to seek compensation. Doctors, nurses and the hospital or other facility that the child was born at can all be sued for negligence. Understanding negligence will help to understand how these cases are built.

A healthcare provider that is negligent is neither incompetent nor incapable. Negligent means that they just didn't perform the way that they should have been expected to and the way that any other healthcare provider could have been expected to perform. When this is the case, the parents sometimes have a good legal action on their hands and can get compensation from a jury award or settlement.

The Event

The event that caused the CP will have to be determined. This is why the criteria for examining the infant exist. Some types of CP are less likely to be caused by negligence than others. In some cases, there may be a particularly egregious type of negligence involved that will result in the doctor being clearly to blame for the cerebral palsy injury. In other cases, it may take a lot of medical investigation to figure out what actually caused the condition and who was responsible, if anyone at all was, indeed, responsible.