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Objective: To analyse clinical and outcome features of patients with mental retardation and transient hypertonia in early life which lead to the diagnosis of hypertonic cerebral palsy., Material and Methods: We study six patients that presented with the above features in our neuropediatric out patients clinic. Clinical data related with the hypertonic signs and its evolution were collected. All the patients were assessed to find their present cognitive and development state., Results: Clinical and radiological signs of a possible prenatal neurological damage were found in all the patients. Structural anomalies were presented in neuroimaging in five cases. Agenesia or hypoplasia of corpus callosum was the most common finding. The pattern of progression of this cases were: 1. Improvement of hypertonia with almost normal tone by the age of two years. 2. Despite of the resolution of motor signs, persistence of different degrees of mental retardation., Conclusions: Our reported patients presented a peculiar pattern of progression within the wide variability of the cerebral palsy group.

Two approaches in the care of malnourished children were evaluated in order to ascertain both their medical and economical effectiveness. One was a group of 745 children under an ambulatory nutritional rehabilitation program that included health care, supplementary foods and nutrition education; a second group of 420 children attended Day Care Centers (8 hours a day and five days per week) where they received a balanced diet, psychomotor stimulation according to age, and health care. The evolution of nutritional status was followed up and plotted against the NCHS/WHO weight-for-height tables. The rate of recovery was unsatisfactory; below 50% in mild cases of malnutrition, and even less in the more severe cases. The average length of time for attaining normality was longer for moderate malnutrition and for the ambulatory program. When the calculation included a correction for the probability of recovery for each system, the advantage of the Day Care Centers became even more evident: the mean length of time for recovery was 33.2% less than the ambulatory program. The social cost per child, per day, was substantially lower in the ambulatory program. The integral calculus of social cost per child, per day, and the corrected mean time for recovery provided the social cost-effectiveness of nutritional recovery. This figure was clearly adventageous for the ambulatory program for all ages and degrees of malnutrition, exception made for moderately malnourished children below two years of age. In this case, the Day Care Centers appeared to be the most effective therapeutic alternative. This type of analysis is a contribution to the evaluation of medico-social programs for the recuperation of malnutrition. The advantage lies in the fact that it allows an optimization in the allocation of resources, when the previous step is the choice of best therapeutic alternative based upon the patient's age and nutritional status.