Tuesday 14 March 2017

Infantile Spasms

Today we welcomed a 20 month old little boy who has suffered with infantile spasms back for his first reassessment.  He has now been on the Snowdrop programme for 6 months.  During that time he has made some nice progress in some areas, most notably in gross motor development where he has developed a sitting balance and has sufficient 'cephalo-caudal development' to warrant us beginning to work on a standing balance.  Visually his eyes are straighter and he is making more sustained eye contact and auditorially he is now more in tune with the human voice and is paying attention to the conversations going on around him.  In terms of fine motor development he has gone from not using his hands at all, to the 4 month level of trying to reach and bringing his hands into the midline and intertwining his fingers.  So there is some nice progress to be seen, well done to a hardworking mum and dad.

Problems do remain however in that visually a great deal of his time is taken up in self stimulation of either the magnocellular pathway, (which enables us to detect movement), by waving his fingers in front of his eyes, or of the visuo - vestibular pathway, where he is constantly swinging his head from side to side.  He is also very fidgety, always on the go, which is detracting from his ability to use his attention consistently to engage with his environment and the people in it.  Instead, he is largely living in a world of self - stimulation and internal 'activity and agitation' and this is our next challenge with this little one, to normalise the sensory systems which are keeping him in a world of his own and to take his level of internal arousal down a peg or two.  Only then will we see him beginning to engage with and to make sense of his world.

Onwards and upwards.

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