Neurodegenerative Disorder

It was spring of 2007, and the town of Hastings, Nebraska, was looking forward to summer. Memorial Day weekend had come and gone, and Kirk and Jami Ortegren had just watched their son Jack crawl for the first time.

When today's Kennedy Krieger Institute first opened its doors in 1967, its leaders were expected to continue and improve the state-of-the-art treatment services already available to children with cerebral palsy at the Children's Rehabilitation Institute, the original facility that became Kennedy Krieger, and to extend those services to children with a variety of other neurodevelopment

Baltimore- Dr. Arnold J. Capute, a faculty member at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for nearly forty years, died November 30 at age 80 from congestive heart failure. Dr. Capute devoted the majority of his career to increasing pediatricians' understanding of neurodevelopmental disabilities, and was instrumental in the creation of the field of Developmental Pediatrics, now called Neurodevelopmental Disabilities.

BALTIMORE - Physicians at Kennedy Krieger Institute and neuro-imaging experts at the Institute's F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging have developed a new way to see the white matter pathways, or "cables," that carry messages from one part of the brain to another in children with cerebral palsy. Already, the new technique has led to a better understanding of how disorders of the developing brain lead to cerebral palsy - which holds promise for better diagnosis and more effective treatment.