Evaluation of the functional capacity of children with cerebral palsy

Purpose to describe the functional capacity of children with cerebral palsy who performed the care of Physical Therapy Specialty and Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. Methods a cross sectional observational study, comprising 14 children with spastic quadriplegic (6 performed Physiotherapy and 8 performed Physiotherapy and Speech therapy). The Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI) and the Manual Abilities Classification System (GMFCS) were used to evaluate them. The associations between categorical variables were analyzed using Fisher exact test. Comparisons between means were performed using the Student t test. Results we didn’t obtain statistically significant improvement in the areas of self-care, mobility and social function between the two groups in the fields of functional skills and caregiver assistance. Conclusion the Physiotherapy group of children had higher functional scores than those in the Physiotherapy group associated with Speech Therapy, but there was no statistically significant difference between the groups. This was probably due to the small number of participants, the diversity of clinical presentation and possible differences of Physical Therapy intervention conducted in two states with very different socioeconomic situations.