Spastic Diplegia and the Significance of Mothers' Previous Reproductive Loss

Abstract

To explore the relationship between spastic diplegia and mothers'' previous reproductive loss, 119 cases of spastic diplegia born between 1953 and 1977 were compared with 2 series of controls. One control group comprised a random sample of all births, the other a random sample of births matched for birthweight and length of gestation. A demonstrable difference in previous reproductive histories was found between mothers of cases of spastic diplegia and mothers of the 1st series of controls, but there was no such difference between mothers of cases and mothers of the 2nd series. The reproductive histories of mothers in cases of spastic diplegia do not seem unique; their unusual number of reproductive losses is related to the child''s associated fetal growth-retardation and not to the presence of diplegia.