Life lessons from a brain surgeon

“You're never alone when you're reading a book.” ― Susan Wiggs.

Author: Dr Rahul Jandial

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Introduction

Life lessons from a brain surgeon!

You might have seen the cover of this book in my blog, well I'm happy to announce that I finally finished it.

As I promised to share my experiences with you, in this post I want to talk about a few facts I found out about neuroscience and neurosurgery by reading this book.

Hope you find it interesting, just like me.

So go grab a cup of tea and a mince pie to read this post with some Christmas vibes.

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1. Fat as a medicine

Ketogenic diet, the original diet for children with epilepsy. deliver over 90% of calories by fat, with very little protein and no carbohydrate.

So firstly, what is ketone and why it is beneficial for epileptic patients?

Your lovely organ ,liver, converts fat to ketones (a type of lipid) which can be used as a fuel for your cells. However, neurons and other cells in your body rather to get their energy from glucose (a sugar derived from carbs) and ketones are kind of a backup energy source.

The reason that this diet is useful for epileptic patients is that the neurons that get their energy from ketones instead of glucose become less excitable, so less chance of getting seizures.

Thus, by following this diet your cells get more ketones rather than glucose.

It is worth mentioning that, since anti-epileptic drugs became common, patients in developed countries tend to stop following this diet.

2. Curing brain cancers

I was so proud to read about a Persian neurosurgeon , Dr. Behnam Badie , who is a member of a team that are developing anti-tumour immune therapy using a modified T-cells

( CAR T-cells ).

Before going to the depth let me tell you what are CAR T-cells.

Chimeric antigen receptor- engineered T-cells, are called chimeric because ordinary cytotoxic T-cells are taken from person's blood and modified with a specific cancer receptors that guides the T-cells to seek and destroy cancer cells, after they are administrated back into the patient.

By modifying them you basically make the attack more specific so your treatment will be more effective and cause less side effects. It's amazing, isn't it!

This treatment had been successful for number of cancers, such as leukaemia, and the brain cancer that is aimed to be treated by this method is a brain metastasis from breast cancer.

As I said these cells are administrated back to the patient.

In patients with brain cancer, they will be transported via a little plastic tube into the brain ventricles, where you can find a fluid called cerebrospinal fluid ( CSF ). This fluid direct these T cells to the site of cancer.

As for now the outcome of this treatment for brain cancers is unknown but scientists are hopeful that the results of these studies will be game-changing for many patients.

3. Sometimes, life is better with half of your brain

Hemispherectomy, is a surgery that your left or right hemisphere of brain will be removed.

You might think why someone want to even undergo this surgery?

Well, it has been noted that 96% of children experience a total or significant reduced in epileptic seizure following it, and mostly children are able to get their full function back because of the neuroplasticity ( half of their brain figure out a way to take over control of both sides of the body. )

However, few studies noted significant effect on children's memory, intelligence, personality or even sense of humour.

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Summary

Neuroscience is an amazing field that is improving phenomenally every single second.

The idea of how health care professionals try to improve patient's quality of life, and how do they cope with all of those stress in their job is astonishing.

I hope you enjoyed reading these facts, let me know if you like these type of posts, so I get motivated to read more books and write more about them!

Thanks to Dr Rahul Jandial for his readable book.

XOXO