MRI findings in patients with spastic cerebral palsy. II: Correlation with type of cerebral palsy.

The authors studied MR images of the brain in 152 patients, aged 1 to 19 years (mean 3.3), who had spastic cerebral palsy (CP) and were attending two hospitals in Japan in 1993 and 1994. Eighty-one patients had diplegia, 45 had quadriplegia, and 26 had hemiplegia. Of patients with diplegia, 72 had periventricular leukomalacia (PVL) and very few had other types of lesions. In patients with quadriplegia, three main types of brain lesions were observed: PVL in 12 patients, term-type brain injury in 22, and brain anomaly in 10. In the 26 patients with hemiplegia, 17 had a unilateral lesion (rare in patients with diplegia and quadriplegia), and bilateral lesions were seen in seven others.