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  3. A TIME columnist bears witness to an operation to help triplets with cerebral palsy walk like other boys. Cindy Hickman near

A TIME columnist bears witness to an operation to help triplets with cerebral palsy walk like other boys. Cindy Hickman near

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问题     A TIME columnist bears witness to an operation to help triplets with cerebral palsy walk like other boys.
    Cindy Hickman nearly bled to death the day she gave birth — three months prematurely — to her triplet sons. Weighing less than 2 lbs. each, her babies were alive, but barely. They clung so tenuously to life that her doctors recommended she name them A, B and C. Then, after a year of heroic interventions — brain shunts, tracheotomies, skull remodeling—often requiring emergency helicopter rides to the hospital nearest their rural Tennessee home, the Hickmans learned that their triplets had cerebral palsy.
    Fifteen years ago there wasn’t much that could be done about cerebral palsy, a disorder caused by damage to the motor centers of the brain. But pediatric medicine has come a long way since then, both in intervention before birth, with better prenatal care and various techniques to postpone delivery, and surgical interventions after birth to correct physical deficiencies. So although the incidence of cerebral palsy seems to be increasing (because the odds of preemies surviving are so much better), so too are the number of success stories.
    This is one of them. Lane, Codie and Wyatt (as the Hickman boys are called) have spastic cerebral palsy, the most common form, accounting for nearly 80% of cases. "We first noticed that they weren’t walking when they should," Cindy recalls. "Instead they were only doing the combat crawl." Their brains seemed to be developing age appropriately, but their muscles were unnaturally stiff, making walking difficult if not impossible.
    Happily, spastic cerebral palsy is also the most treatable form of CP, largely thanks to a procedure known as selective dorsal rhizotomy, in which the nerve roots that are causing the problem are isolated and severed. Among the first to champion SDR in the U.S. in the late 1980s was Dr. T.S. Park, a Korean-born pediatric neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who has preformed more than 800 of these operations and hopes to do an additional 1,000 before he retires.
    Peering through a microscope and guided by an electric probe, we were able to distinguish between the two groups of nerve roots leaving the spinal cord. The ventral roots send information to the muscle; the dorsal roots send information back to the spinal cord. The dorsal roots cause spasticity, and if just the right ones are severed, the symptoms can be greatly reduced.
    Nearly half a million Americans suffer from cerebral palsy. Not all are candidates for SDR, but Park estimates that as many as half may be. He gets the best results with children between ages 2 and 6 who were born prematurely and have stiffness only in their legs. He is known for performing the operation very high up in the spine, right where the nerve roots exit the spinal cord. It’s riskier that way, but the recovery is faster, and in Park’s skilled hands, the success rate is higher.
    Cindy and Jeremy Hickman will testify to that. Just a few weeks after the procedure, two of their sons are walking almost normally and the third is rapidly improving.
Cerebral palsy is________.
选项 A、a deadly disease
B、a kind of brain disorder
C、not treatable for children who are over 6 and have stiffness in their legs
D、to be cured by isolating and cutting off the right nerve roots
答案D
解析 正误判断题。因本题定位困难，故可用排除法解。从全文来看，这种病并非是致命的，反而是可治疗的，A不对：文中并未提及麻痹症超过6岁就治疗不了，只是在倒数第二段提到Park医生治疗对象中2～6岁的儿童恢复最好，C错误：这种病因是大脑某区域的破坏导致的某种混乱，但并未说明是大脑的混乱，因此B为混淆项。从文章倒数第三段的最后一句可知D为正确选项。故答案为D。
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