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Sunday, 2 July 2006
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Australian doctors have seized on a study showing one-third of hospital admissions are avoidable, arguing it underscores the need for preventative medicine.
Surely every dollar spent preventing ill-health saves many more dollars in treatment? Yes?
[ABC News: Health]
10:49:18 PM 
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A report by the Australian Council of Smoking and Health reveals that the combination of drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco leads to a greater risk of developing cancer.
Surprise, surprise.
[ABC News: Health]
8:35:47 PM
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David Pescovitz:
This week's New Yorker features an engaging article by Christine Kenneally about hemispherectomy, perhaps "the most radical procedure in neurosurgery." In this procedure, an entire side of the hemisphere is removed as a treatment for cancer or chronic seizures. The incredible thing is that if the hemispherectomy is done when a patient is very young, the remaining hemisphere does double duty and the child often develops normally. From the New Yorker:
Many children who have had hemispherectomies at Johns Hopkins are in high school, and one, a college student, is on the dean's list. The families of these children can barely believe the transformation, and not so long ago neurologists and neurosurgeons found it hard to believe as well. I asked (neurosurgeon George) Jallo if he remembered his first hemispherectomy. ""Yes and no," he said. "I don't remember the patient. It was more of a 'Wow.' I was a resident in training and I assisted in one of the operations. I didn't realize you could take out that much brain tissue and have someone be so functional and useful in society. What amazes me is that, if someone all of a sudden strokes out half of the brain, more likely than not they are not going to survive. Yet a lot of these people develop their seizures when they're very young, or in utero, and when you take out half of their brain in one sitting it's as if they weren't touched."
There are wide variations in recovery, and any brain surgery carries grave risks. Many factors affect how well a patient does; age at the time of a condition's onset, age at the time of the operation, the nature of the condition itself, and the determination of parents and caregivers to maintain an intense schedule of therapy before and afterward. Possibly the greatest danger is posed by the brain's veins and arteries, which are so numerous and so wildly, individually arranged that they are impossible to map and very hard to control. Excessive bleeding can send patients into shock and then into comas from which they never return, or it can wipe out most brain function. The other conflicting challenge of the surgery is the necessity of making sure that enough tissue is removed. Freeman once saw a small boy who made good progress for six months following a hemispherectomy, after which he began to deteriorate. His doctors discovered that they had left a small piece of the excised hemisphere in the child's head. It was, said Freeman, no larger than the top joint of his thumb. But the electricity from that piece of neural tissue was enough to compromise the remaining hemisphere. The boy had another operation, a 'redo', as the doctors at Johns Hopkins informally call it, in which the bad piece of brain was removed. After that, he had no more seizures.
Link
I wish I had a reference to it (I don't), but I once saw a British TV doco showing three people who had almost no brain at all, each of them functioning quite well in society. The most severe case was a quite brilliant academic I think. The way it worked was thus. Each person had a thin film of brain cells lining the inside of the skull. The rest of the skull was filled with fluid. In spite of this, with a brain perhaps a fiftieth the size of most people's, they performed all human functions we recognise as being performed by the brain. The doco made the point that there were many more cases, but that they are kept from the patients unless they either have to know for some reason, or find out accidentally. All three cases in the doco had found out by accident.
By noemail@noemail.org (David Pescovitz). [Boing Boing]
8:28:13 PM
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Pictures from the prologue in Strasbourg
This will be an amazing tour, given the controversy breaking in the two days before it began. So many favourites out; everything is up in the air.
[BBC Sport | Other Sports | Cycling | World Edition]
12:20:26 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 20/8/06; 5:56:09 PM.
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