Define Decorticate Posturing
Decorticate posture is stiff with legs held out straight fists.
Define decorticate posturing. Decorticate and decerebrate posturing refers to primitive stereotyped motor responses exhibited by patients with severe brain injury. Decorticate posturing is an abnormal posturing and it is defined as semi flexion adduction and internal rotation at the shoulders and semi flexion or flexion at the elbows clenched fists and legs held out straight 1 the arms are bent in toward the body and the wrists and fingers are bent and held on the chest. Patients with decorticate posturing present with the arms flexed or bent inward on the chest the hands are clenched into fists and the legs extended and feet turned inward.
It is the characteristic posture of a patient with a lesion at or above the upper brainstem. A position of a person s body or body parts. Decorticate posturing is also called decorticate response decorticate rigidity flexor posturing or colloquially mummy baby.
There are many causes reported apart from the one discussed before. Decorticate posturing is a posturing that indicates a severe damage in the brain. Posturing manifested by the obtunded patient pulling arms and hands medially toward the center core of the body in response to noxious stimuli.
Nerve pathway between the brain and spinal cord lead to the abnormal posture named decorticate posture. The posture of a supplicant. However this is not as serious as decerebrate posture wherein the particular kind of posturing appears on both sides of one s body.
Decorticate posture causes main cause reported behind the decorticate abnormal posturing is the severe brain injury. This abnormal posturing makes a person suffer from clenched fists bent arms and legs that are held out straight. Decorticate posturing is a pattern of movement produced by extensive lesions in white matter internal capsule or thalamus and characterized by rigidity flexion of the arms fists and fingers and extension of the legs.
What is decorticate posturing.