[Medical and educational challenges in the care of children with disabilities].

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) serves as a useful tool to describe the numerous challenges that pediatricians face when dealing with disabled children. In this review article, we will first discuss the issues of diagnosis announcement and communication modalities. In a second part, we will expose the challenges posed by newly available therapies for rare disorders, and innovative technologies in the field of disability, which are at the crossroads of medicine, engineering and education.

Independent walking as a major skill for the development of anticipatory postural control: evidence from adjustments to predictable perturbations.

Although there is suggestive evidence that a link exists between independent walking and the ability to establish anticipatory strategy to stabilize posture, the extent to which this skill facilitates the development of anticipatory postural control remains largely unknown. Here, we examined the role of independent walking on the infants' ability to anticipate predictable external perturbations. Non-walking infants, walking infants and adults were sitting on a platform that produced continuous rotation in the frontal plane.

Primary motor cortex inhibition in spinal cord injuries.

Objectives And Methods: Excitability changes in the primary motor cortex in 17 spinal-cord injured (SCI) patients and 10 controls were studied with paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation. The paired pulses were applied at inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) of 2 ms and 15 ms while motor evoked potentials (MEP) were recorded in the biceps brachii (Bic), the abductor pollicis brevis (APB) and the tibialis anterior (TA) muscles.

Results: The study revealed a significant decrease in cortical motor excitability in the first weeks after SCI concerning the representation of both the affected muscles innervated from spinal segments below the lesion, and the spared muscles rostral to the lesion.

Successful epilepsy surgery with a resection contralateral to a suspected epileptogenic lesion.

We report on a case of frontal lobe epilepsy in an eight-year-old girl. Seizure semiology and EEG indicated an epileptogenic zone localized in the mesial frontal structures, without clear-cut lateralization. MRI showed a lesion in the right cingulate gyrus, initially regarded as a hamartoma.

From egocentric to exocentric spatial orientation: development of posture control in bimanual and trunk inclination tasks.

The authors investigated the emergence of independent control of body segments in bimanual tasks involving either voluntary or involuntary trunk motion by tracking the transition from an ego- to an exocentric mode of postural control during childhood (i.e., from body-referenced orientation to externally referenced action).