Ankle Clonus? How much should we worry?

Our son was born premature at 33 wks, and he did show signs of ankle clonus for quite some time (~4-5 months) and there were times when it was sustained indefinately (>20 beats) especially when he was asleep or very relaxed.  

While most doctors seemed dismissive of this, they could not provide me a lot of additional information to why.  As such I became pretty stressed out and turned to a lot of these message boards and poured over different cryptic medical studies such as www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9071490 that did NOT make me feel any better.

In any case, I want to post on these to let everyone know that my son is 100% fine now @ 7 months (it was NS immaturity) and it's ME who is still recovering from the anxiety of this experience.

Through all of this, I've learned that in the case of ankle clonus- the overall health of your child plays a big part of whether this is an issue or not and chances are if *it* is of concern, you probably are already working with your doctors to around more significant hurdles such as muscle tone abnormalites and motor development.

Above all, a nurse once told me at the height of my anxiety that children are amazing in their ability to heal and overcome any obstacle- so no matter the case I truly believe think will be much better than your fears will lead you to believe.

Please take care of yourself and best wishes! :0)


This discussion is related to ankle clonus.