How do spinal cord injuries before puberty affect physical growth and development? - Lawrence Vogel, MD

Children who are injured before puberty, spinal cord injuries result in almost 100 percent of them developing scoliosis or spine deformity of one sort or another. And in fact, in our studies, we found that two-thirds of those who develop scoliosis, end up requiring surgery. So it’s a very, very common problem. So most kids from zero to five, and also children from 6-12, so both groups are kind of pre-pubertal have this very high incidence of scoliosis or spine deformity. In addition, when an injury occurs in a very young child, particularly kids under five years of age, particularly if they are more of a flaccid paralysis, so they don’t, don’t have spasticity for insistence in their legs, sometimes they don’t have as much growth in the paralyzed extremities as they would if they weren’t paralyzed. So some of the kids may just simply have smaller legs, and that can sometimes be a problem for individuals, you know, just that they’re wearing a smaller shoe size then their colleagues.