National Institutes of Health Report on Causes of Mental Retardation and Cerebral Palsy

Neurologic and communicative disorders affect 42 million Americans. Mental retardation is present in 780,000 school-age children, cerebral palsy affects 750,000 Americans, and nearly 2 million individuals have epilepsy. Among these 42 million are countless individuals who suffer combinations of these neurologic disabilities. In an effort to define our current state of knowledge about the prenatal and perinatal factors associated with brain disordens, the National Institute of Neurologic and Communicative Disorders and Stroke (NINCDS) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHHD) appointed a group of experts to survey current data in order to identify pregnancy- and birth-related events that may account for the continued incidence of neurologic handicap among infants and children. Their results were published in a report entitled Prenatal and Perinatal Factors Associated with Brain Disorders. Despite rapid advances in obstetric and neonatal medicine during the past several decades, physicians, patients, and attorneys still believe that the major causes of brain disorders are related to birth trauma and problems of labor. The Committee found that, although it was once simple to say that a specific event such as birth trauma or asphyxia caused brain disorders, it is not usually possible to pinpoint a single cause and its effect. The normal brain's ability to repair or compensate for even major developmental disruptions, combined with the gross and subtle interactions of biologic, social and environmental factors, confounds the task of assigning etiologies to brain disorders. The causes of severe mental retardation are primarily genetic, biochemical, viral, and developmental and not related to birth events.