Cerebral Palsy maybe/maybe not

You can simply report that last year 0.001% of the population got run down by trucks (I made that number up) - and/or - you can advise that folks don't stand in highways. Percent relatedness of CP to prematurity is a batting average. The idea is to avoid being a statistic. Look to causation. Maybe the first truck just brushed you, but a bigger wider one is bearing down? Turns out that of the 0.001% who are hit by trucks, 80% are run over by six more following cars. Ouch. That's the point. When brushed by a truck, don't stand there giving the trucker the finger. Move! Fortunately, outside the ventricles the brain has a superhighway of up and down going motor and sensory pathways made mostly of cell projections and not the cell bodies themselves. Conduits. The motor lanes that involve the legs are most central. As you go from the feet upward, neurological input paths layer on top and thus are further from center. Geometry figures in diplegia. The range of severity in diplegia correlates with the concentric layering on of motor pathways as you travel up the spinal cord and to the brain past the ventricles. Closest to the ventricles are the projections from the foot and ankle. Furthest away are those from the neck. So, just foot involvement means a small radius of damage. Hand or neck involvement implies a larger radius of damage which may well overlap other kinds of structures. Other kinds? Closest are the basal ganglia. Damage can generate inappropriate rigidness and/or dystonic signals (described below). Because the cortex is spared in spastic diplegia (PVL), intention and knowing of movement is intact. What was actually damaged were tracts that inhibit (tune) many of the spindles which, by default, sets them high. The connections For normalcy of intent & action are there. I am guessing that some of those more direct neurons (not 3 to a run but 2 or 1) get damaged with the neurons