Identification of Barriers and its Influence on the Quality of Life in School Going Children with Cerebral Palsy

Background: Cerebral palsy is a group of non-progressive permanent disorders causing limitations in various aspects and facing barriers in their ADL’s. However, they play an important role in deciding the quality of life of a child. Thus, schools form an important crossroad for a child outside his safe environment, in order to interact with others and environment, where he might face majority of his barriers. Thus, identifying them is of great importance.

Aim: To identify the barriers and determine its influence on the quality of life in school going children with cerebral palsy.

Study Design: Observational analytical.

Methods and Material: 30 subjects who were school going children with CP, between the age group of 9-12 years with GMFCS I and II levels and an IQ of above 69 were recruited. Interview based Parent reported LAQ-CP was collected followed child reported CP-QOL.

Statistical analysis used: Mean scores of all the domains of LAQ- CP was removed to find out the barriers whereas spearman’s correlation coefficient was removed to find the influence of barriers on the quality of life.

Results: Mobility was found to be the biggest barrier faced by children. Also, there were 13 domains that were significantly negatively correlated to the barriers.

Conclusions: Our study showed that mobility proves to be one of the biggest barriers, also the LAQ-CP scale shows negative correlation with many domains of CP-QOL scale indicating that barriers faced by these children influence their quality of life.