Age-related differences in behavioral outcomes of bimanual functional motor tasks in children and adolescents with cerebral palsy: a scoping review.
Hubert D Gascon, Sahian Alicia Maldonado Numata, Sandrine Emond and 2 others
PMID 39636710WHAT IT FOUND
Children with cerebral palsy showed poorer bimanual performance than typically developing peers, and task complexity made this worse.
Age-related differences were inconsistent: only a few studies showed improvement with age.
Key findings
01Children with cerebral palsy took longer to complete bimanual drawer tasks than typically developing peers, with less hand movement overlap and longer goal synchronization.
02Only two KINARM studies reported age-related improvement in bimanual performance, while two other studies found no age relationship.
03Making bimanual tasks harder, such as opening a drawer with the affected hand or adding distractors, worsened performance.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Most included studies did not report age-related effects, so the review could not answer the main age question directly. The studies used many different tasks, instruments, and outcome measures, which made comparison and pooling difficult. Most studies were observational cross-sectional studies, not trials of treatment. The sample was overwhelmingly unilateral cerebral palsy and mostly Manual Ability Classification System levels I to III, so findings may not apply to bilateral or more severe profiles. Only five studies included children aged 2 to 4 years, and five studies included participants over 18 years, so the age range was uneven. The review included only studies with instrumented measures and full text in English or French, which may have excluded relevant work.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that bimanual function reliably improves with age in children with cerebral palsy. Most studies did not report age effects, and the few that did gave inconsistent findings.