Before the medical team decides on a surgical treatment for your child with a gait disorder, he will undergo a gait analysis. Gait analysis allows our surgeons to treat your child with more precision, and makes it possible to address all of your child’s gait problems at once.

Most children with cerebral palsy with gait disorders have issues which need to be addressed either with surgery, bracing or medications at multiple levels.  We design surgeries to correct as many bony and soft tissue deformities as possible during a single trip to the operating room.

In the case of children with involvement of both legs, this involves the use of two surgical teams, allowing for a more comprehensive approach to treatment. After the one surgical event, your child will only require one course of rehabilitation, rather than multiple surgical episodes and multiple courses of rehabilitation and recovery.

Muscle lengthening procedures may be performed surgically to improve joint motion and gait, and to prevent deformities. Lengthening procedures can also be used to decrease the need for bony surgery in younger children, and reduce tone on a more permanent basis than botulinum toxin. 

Tendon transfers allow muscles to be partially transferred to a different location in the joint, which can balance the forces across a joint in a better way. 

Bony reconstruction allows for direct restoration of anatomic position of joints, or relief of rotational abnormalities which result in brace intolerance. 

In cases where the deformity is too severe to be managed with simple realignment, fusion can provide a durable option to provide long term support of a child’s skeleton.