Low Apgar Score at Birth Associated with a Later Diagnosis of
Cerebral Palsy  October 15, 2010  A low vitality score, better
known as an Apgar score, at birth is a strong predictor of a
later diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy according to a new study
published on bmj.com. The authors learned that children with an
Apgar score of less than 3 at birth had a 100 times more likely
chance of developing cerebral palsy than those with an Apgar
score of 10. The correlation between a low Apgar and cerebral
palsy was highest in children with normal birth weight and
modest in children with low birth weight.  The study measured
these correlations in more then a half million Norwegian
children born between 1986 and 1995. Of those children almost 2
in 1000 were given the diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy before they
reached the age of 5.  The most important conclusion to be drawn
from this data is that Cerebral Palsy is closely related to
factors that also effect infant vitality, something that has
been strongly suspected in medicine f