Medicine & Health
neurophilosophy | September 17, 2007I got this email yesterday, and am posting it here on the off chance that a reader might be able to help out.
I thought that the article on traumatic brain injury on the front line was most fascinating and I was hoping you might know of speakers in New York who might be able to speak on the subject. I am from 1199SEIU League Training and Upgrading Fund, the largest non-profit education and training orgnization of healthcare workers in the United States, covering over 350 employers and approximately 275,000 healthcare employees. The development and delivery of these seminars reflect a…
neurophilosophy | September 17, 2007From Yahoo! News:
A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said.
The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.
"Police have ruled out the possibility of suicide," the newspaper said, adding that exhaustion was the most likely cause of death. It did not say what game he was playing.
neurophilosophy | September 15, 2007This week, I've received three books which I'll be writing about in the near future:
My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Dully was lobotomized at the age of 12 at the behest of his stepmother - that's him on the right, holding an instrument identical to the one he was lobotomized with; this book is his memoir.
The Lobotomist, by Jack El-Hai, a biography of Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist who, in 1960, performed Dully's lobotomy.
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee. This is about the somatosensory cortex, that part of the brain on which the body…
neurophilosophy | September 13, 2007The word "zombie" usually brings to mind the creatures depicted in numerous horror films - the mindless, rotting "living dead" who shuffle with their arms stretched out in front of them, devouring the flesh of their victims.
Zombies feature widely in popular culture, but the idea of the zombie originates in the Vodun religion. Popularly known as voodoo, this religion has been misrepresented and sensationalized, particularly in Hollywood films, according to which its followers practice bizarre rituals involving voodoo dolls and cannibalism.
In reality, Vodun is a complex belief system…
neurophilosophy | September 12, 2007On March 4th 1991, four days after the end of the Persian Gulf War, ground troops from the U.S. 37th Engineering Battalion destroyed large caches of weapons found at the Khamisiyah Ammunitions Storage Facility, a site approximately 25 square kilometres in size, located some 350km south east of Baghdad.
The U.S. Department of Defense initially denied that its troops may have been exposed to nerve agents during the demolitions at Khamisiyah, but following an inspection of the site by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1997, it emerged that the munitions destroyed on that day…
neurophilosophy | September 12, 2007
This morning, I went with my girlfriend Alice (and our son Oscar) to the Foetal Medicine Unit at St. Thomas's Hospital, where she had the first ultrasound scan of her second pregnancy.
Alice has just entered the second trimester of the pregnancy, and the foetus you see above is just 6 cm in length. Our baby's due in March of next year.
neurophilosophy | September 10, 2007The Royal National Institute for the Deaf, the largest charity representing the U.K.'s 9 million deaf and hard of hearing people, warns that two thirds of youngsters using MP3 players are at risk of premature and permanent hearing loss:
The charity used decibel meters to test the volume of 110 young people's MP3 players in Brighton, Manchester and Birmingham and found that 72 out of those tested were listening at over 85 decibels. Separate research by the charity found that almost half of young people who use MP3 players listen for more than an hour a day, with a quarter listening for more…
neurophilosophy | September 10, 2007 Sport and recreational activities account for some 21% of traumatic brain injuries in American children and adolescents, and football players are particularly prone to head injuries that can lead to permanent brain damage.
American football is associated with more head injuries than any other. Last year, for example, more than 34,600 football players were treated for head injuries in U.S. hospital emergency rooms. But the incidence of traumatic brain injury among footballers maybe far higher, as injuries that could cause damage to the brain often go unnoticed.
Players experience repeated…
neurophilosophy | September 8, 2007 Daniel Vasella, chief executive of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, discusses the U.S. health care system in an interview with the New York Times.
Vasella, who was listed in the Time 100 of 2004, has this to say about the demographics of Alzheimer's Disease:
In the United States alone, we have an estimated five million patients. The costs are about $150 billion a year. With the aging of the population, and the strong link between senile dementia and Alzheimer's, the patients who will get it is increasing dramatically. By 2050 worldwide, it's estimated that the number of people…
neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007The film below shows surgeons from the Neuroscience Institute at Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center perform a hemispherectomy on a 6-year-old girl with epilepsy. This involves removing a large part of the girl's left hemisphere; the corpus callosum, the bundle of approximately 100 million nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres, is then severed.
One of the surgeons in the film describes epilepsy as "an electrical storm" in the brain. The procedure is performed to remove the eye of this "storm". The corpus callosum is then severed, just in case the tissue which is the source of the…
neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007
From the BBC:
Doctors in China have discovered 26 sewing needles embedded in the body of a 31-year-old woman.
They think they were inserted into Luo Cuifen's body when she was a baby by grandparents upset she was not a boy.
Some of these needles have penetrated vital organs, such as the lungs, liver and kidneys. One has even broken into three pieces in the woman's brain.
Presumably, this was a failed attempt at female infanticide. Because of the one child policy, there is a preference among Chinese couples for boys over girls, as only boys carry on the family name. Hence,…
neurophilosophy | September 3, 2007
In The rise and fall of the prefrontal lobotomy, I discussed the heart-breaking case of Howard Dully, whose stepmother had him lobotomized when he was12 years old.
Dully relates his story in My Lobotomy, an autobiographical book which is co-authored by novelist and journalist Charles Fleming. My Lobotomy is published today in the U.S., and in a few month's time in the U.K.
Both Dully and Fleming have contacted me recently, and Fleming has kindly agreed to send me a copy of the book, so I'll write more about it when I've read it. Meanwhile, you can read more about it on Dully's blog.
neurophilosophy | August 30, 2007I was contacted by Craig J. Phillips earlier this year, but neglected to mention the comment he posted at my old blog. Craig posted this comment here several days ago:
I am a traumatic brain injury survivor and a master's level rehabilitation counselor. I sustained an open skull fracture with right frontal lobe damage and remained in a coma for 3 weeks at the age of 10 in August of 1967. I underwent brain and skull surgery after waking from the coma. Follow-up cognitive and psychosocial testing revealed that I would not be able to succeed beyond high school. In 1967 Neurological…
neurophilosophy | August 29, 2007 Alzheimer's Disease is the most common form of age-related dementia, affecting an estimated 25 million people worldwide.The pathological hallmarks of this condition, which were described 100 years ago by the German pathologist Alois Alzheimer, consist of plaques of amyloid beta protein and neurofibrillary tangles made of tau protein. These insoluble deposits accumulate within the brain, and are believed to be toxic to nerve cells.
Now, researchers from Harvard Medical School show that the amyloid plaques in mice with Alzheimer's-like pathology can be effectively cleared by implanting cells…
neurophilosophy | August 22, 2007Reuters reports that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved the use of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in children and teenagers.
neurophilosophy | August 12, 2007 There's an interesting case study in The Lancet, about a woman who began hearing voices with speech impairments following a bicycle accident.
The 63-year-old woman was treated at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Bern, Switzerland, after falling from her bicycle and hitting her head. Following the accident, she suffered a brain hemorrhage and lost consciousness.
Upon her arrival at the hospital, it was found that the woman had an aneurysm (a blood-filled dilation of a blood vessel in the brain). This was treated, and a craniotomy was performed to after tests showed damage in the…
neurophilosophy | August 11, 2007From The Times:
A ruling by the national drug watchdog to limit access to an Alzheimer's drug has been upheld by the High Court.
The drug company Eisai challenged the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) over its guidance that for most patients Eisai's drug Aricept was not a cost-effective use of NHS resources.
This is a complex judgement. In November, the government body NICE, which issues guidelines regarding all aspects of healthcare in the National Health Service, stated that the acetylcholinesterase inhibitors Aricept (Donepezil), Reminyl (…
neurophilosophy | August 8, 2007 Alzheimer's is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterised by the formation of senile plaques consisting of amyloid-beta protein. The molecular genetic basis of Alzheimer's is very complex. Amyloid-beta is a toxic protein fragment produced by abnormal processing of amyloid precursor protein (APP), which accumulates to form the insoluble plaques found within cells. (This occurs by a seeding mechanism similar to that of prion proteins.)
A new study, by researchers at UCL's Institute of Ophthalmology, in collaboration with French and Italian colleagues, now confirms the role of…
neurophilosophy | August 7, 2007Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is said to be one of the signature injuries of the conflict in Iraq, and accounts for a larger proportion of troop casualties than it has in previous wars fought by the United States. According to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, the U. S. military formally diagnosed 2,121 cases of TBI between October 2001 and January 2007.
The incidence of TBI among troops may actually be much higher than these official statistics suggest, largely because of the increasing use of the signature weapon of the Iraq war: the improvised explosive device (IED).…
neurophilosophy | August 5, 2007
According to a new paper in the British Medical Journal, there is an association between duration of deployment and incidence of alcohol problems and post-traumatic stress disorder in British troops:
Personnel who were deployed for 13 months or more in the past three years were more likely to fulfil the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder...and have multiple physical symptoms...A significant association was found between duration of deployment and severe alcohol problems. Exposure to combat partly accounted for these associations. The associations between number of deployments in…