Abid Khan, Amna Aamir Khan.
Role of exercises in improving static, dynamic and functional balance in cerebral palsy.
Pak J Rehabil Jan ;6(2):4-13.

AIM: To rule out the effectiveness and essence of exercise interventions for improving static, dynamic and functional balance in Cerebral Palsy (CP) patients. METHOD: American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine(AACPDM) guidelines was used to formulate the review. Six databases were searched (PubMed, Google scholar, Cochrane, CINAH, PEDro, Scopus ) using a total number of 28 studies reporting 13 exercise protocols with functional, static and dynamic postural controls. RESULTS: Five protocols received moderate level of evidence where Treadmill training with little or no body support, Hippotherapy, Gross motor training, Trunk-targeted training, reactive balance training. Six treatment protocols had shown weak or conflicting evidences such as Neuro-Developmental Therapy (NDT), Hippotherapy simulators, Electrical stimulation usually know as Functional Electrical Stimulation(FES), treadmill training with full or partial body weight support, visual biofeedback (using mirror) and virtual reality. CONCLUSION: The therapeutic exercise based treatment to improve the overall balance of CP children has remarkably increased since last decade. More studies are suggested to be conducted in order to establish a strong relation between intervention and the outcomes on postural controls. Moreover, future researches must rule out the outliers by standardizing the protocols that are lacking in presentstudies. KEYWORDS: Cerebral Palsy, Postural Control, Functional Balance, NDT, BWSTT, Hippotherapy, FES.

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