Surgery to remove abnormal growths of the brain, peripheral nervous system or the spine or any disorder can be tricky because the brain and the skull that shields it are complex areas. In the old days, open surgery was the only way to access the brain or spinal cord. But, with the invention of laparoscopy, keyhole surgery to treat neurological issues is gaining ground.

What is Neuroendoscopy? 
Neuroendoscopy is a surgical procedure that is favoured by doctors and patients alike because it is minimally invasive.
Before the surgery, you will be administered general anaesthesia so that you will be unconscious during the entire duration. During the surgery, the surgeon will drill a minute hole into your skull just above the eyebrows. You skull also has two natural openings. That is why the surgeon may make use of the nose or the mouth to access the region that needs to be operated upon.

Neuroendoscopy is useful because -

  It lets the surgeon reach regions that are not accessible with open surgery
  The tumour can be removed without any damage being done to surrounding tissues

An endoscope is a delicate device with a high-resolution camera mounted on it. There is an eyepiece on the other end. The device is also fitted with a light. When it is inserted into the brain, it lights up the passage and the eyepiece allows the surgeon to take a look inside. The camera sends a live feed of the path it is traversing and this guides the surgeon. When the tumour is reached, it is gently removed with other surgical instruments that too were inserted through the cavities or the drilled hole.

Benefits of Neuroscopy -
There are several advantages of relying on laparoscopy -

  The patient endures less pain
  Fewer chances of infection
  Faster recovery
  Very little scarring of tissues

Which Disorders call for Neuroendoscopy?
Any of the following disorders can be put to rights with a neuroendoscopic surgery -

  Pituitary tumours
  Rathke s cleft cysts
  Pineal area tumours
  Ventricular tumours
  Skull base tumours
  Brain inflammation triggered by an infection
  Chordomas
  Cerebrospinal fluid fistulas
  Trigeminal neuralgia
  Cerebral aneurysm

After Surgery-
Once you undergo the neuroendoscopic surgery, you will have to be rehabilitated so that your condition can be monitored round the clock. Neuroendoscopy is a state of the art clean and efficient surgery that is beneficial to both surgeons as well as the patients.

Know More About Neuroendoscopy And Its Uses!

Trigeminal neuralgia is specified by the condition of a chronic pain that influences the trigeminal nerve. This nerve transfers sensation from one s face to his/her brain. If a person is suffering from trigeminal neuralgia, then a gentle stimulation of face (sourced from brushing teeth or applying makeup) might generate a fright of agonizing pain. The affected person might experience short and mild attacks initially. However, the trigeminal neuralgia might progress and generate more-frequently and longer attack of severely critical pain. Women get affected by this situation more than men get and it is more prominently occur in individuals older than 50 years.

Trigeminal neuralgia does not mandatorily mean that you need to experience a lifelong pain. Various types of treatment alternatives are available and so doctors can usually handle the particular condition effectively by taking help of injections, medications or surgery. Various types of triggers might cause the pain regarding trigeminal neuralgia, such as eating, drinking, shaving, brushing teeth, touching face, smiling, washing face etc.

Symptoms

The symptoms of trigeminal neuralgia might comprise of one or more patterns and some of these are described below:

Sequences of serious, jolting or shooting pain that might generate as an electric shock
Spontaneous pain attacks or attacks stimulated by different activities like face touching, speaking, chewing, or brushing teeth. Pain attacks last from a few moments to some minutes.
It is not a comprehensive list because Trigeminal neuralgia hosts various other symptoms as well. If a person feels facial pain, specifically recurring or prolonged pain or if the person does not get relief through the utilization over-the-counter pain relievers, then that person must consult a doctor.
How does Radiofrequency Ablation treat Trigeminal Neuralgia?
Trigeminal Neuralgia is a chronic and painful condition that involves the trigeminal nerve. There are two separate trigeminal nerves on both sides of the face, which carry the sensations like pain from the face to the body. Each nerve has three branches- forehand, midface and chin and trigeminal neuralgia can cause intense pain in any of these areas.

Causes-

This occurs when the trigeminal nerve functioning is disrupted. When the blood vessel/artery and the trigeminal nerve at the base of your brain come in contact, it puts pressure on the nerves and causes pain.
It also occurs as a result of ageing or multiple sclerosis
A disorder that damages the myelin sheath protecting the nerves can trigger pain
Sometimes pain occurs from tumors, which compresses the trigeminal nerves
Surgical strokes, facial trauma or strokes can also be the root cause of excruciating pain
Triggers-

Shaving
Touching your face
Eating and drinking
Putting on makeup
Brushing
Washing your face
Symptoms-
The pain can be mild and for a shorter duration or it can happen frequently for longer durations. Some experience the pain in cycles where it can come and go for days or even for weeks. Gradually the intensity of the pain lessens.

Cure by Radio-frequency Ablation
The treatment of trigeminal neuralgia is often a challenging process in clinical practice. When medicines do not prove as effective, surgery is the desired option.

Procedure-

After applying local anaesthesia, the Pain Specialist carefully inserts a needle through the corner of your mouth to reach the trigeminal nerve
The doctors then wake up the patient after stimulating the nerves and ask them to feel the stimulation at the same place where they undergo pain. This confirms their targeted location
Once you fall asleep again, the Pain Specialist uses radiofrequency heat to injure the nerve enough to create numbness and removes the pain
How Effective is Radio-frequency Ablation?
The pain is cured almost in 98% of the patients. 50% of patients report recurrence of pain after about two years. Hence the procedure can be repeated in the same patient if necessary.

Trigeminal Neuralgia And Radio-Frequency Ablation - What Causes It?

Leading a life with peripheral neuropathy is quite similar to riding a roller coaster. Managing the pain can be frustrating at one time and overwhelming on the other as patients can experience alternating symptoms with debilitating pain. So you should learn about the various treatment options as they can help you go a long way in managing the pain.

The peripheral nerves are considered the longest in the body which extend from the hands to feet. When these nerves are damaged, you may feel some sort of pain, tingling in the hands and feet and even numbness, and these symptoms can even get worse and you may experience stabbing pain with increasing weakness. 

There are many things that you should know about peripheral neuropathy as they would help you to manage the condition much more effectively.

Diabetes is the leading cause of neuropathy: More than 70% of diabetics develop symptoms of peripheral neuropathy. So you should keep your blood sugar within optimum levels as a means of reversing diabetic neuropathy.
A melange of causes behind neuropathy: Though diabetes is the number 1 cause of peripheral neuropathy, other causes include deficiency of vitamin B12, alcoholism, traumatic injury, chemotherapy and exposure to toxic substances. Physicians may find it difficult to pin-point the cause and when this happens. This is often termed as  idiopathic neuropathy .
Medications causing neuropathy: If you are suffering from diabetes and being treated with the drug named metformin, you may develop peripheral neuropathy.
Preventing neuropathy is the most recommended way: While it is the fact that some nerves may potentially get damaged from certain surgeries or injury, peripheral neuropathy can be potentially prevented or sometimes stopped from spreading. As diabetes is a major cause of diabetes, being watchful about your diet and exercising regularly can help you go a long way to prevent diabetes as well as neuropathy.
Pain is not simply confined to a tingling sensation: Though pain and a tingling sensation is the commonest and easiest way of recognising the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy, each of your sensory, motor and autonomic nerves can show different set of symptoms that you should be watchful of.
A diet may make the symptoms even worse: You can either help or hurt your nerves with your choice of foods. For improving symptoms, you should avoid food with excessive sugar, refined grains and artificial sweeteners as they may strain your nerves and irritate them further.
Whether you are recently diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy or living with it for many years, understanding a few conditions would help you make informed decisions about your well-being.

Peripheral Neuropathy - 6 Things You Should Know!

The neurones in the brain are constantly reorganising their connections both functionally and physically according to the environment, your thinking and behaviour. This ability is known as neuroplasticity. Through neuroplasticity the nerve cells of brain can compensate for injury to some parts of the brain and enable a person to recover from stroke, birth abnormalities. It is also beneficial in treating autism, ADD, learning disabilities and helps manage obsessive compulsive disorders.

Here are seven things you should know about neuroplasticity.

Change depends on the attentiveness of the brain: Neuroplasticity changes can only happen if the brain is alert and active. When the brain is active it releases neurochemicals that are necessary for the neurone connections to change. If a person is distracted to inattentive, these changes cannot happen.
The more the effort; the bigger the change: Neuroplasticity changes depend on how motivated the person is to change or learn new tasks. For this reason, when it comes to using neuroplasticity for physiotherapy, it is essential to first deal with any depression or anxiety issues the patient might be having before attempting to rehabilitate them.
It helps strengthen neural connections: Repetition of actions is one of the key elements of neuroplasticity in physiotherapy. Through this, the strength of neurone connections is strengthened to include sensory information, movement and cognitive patterns.
It improves cell to cell connections: This is crucial to a patient s rehabilitation as it increases reliability and makes a person more independent. In turn, this makes behaviour patterns more reliable.
It helps predict actions: A task can usually be broken down into a series of smaller tasks. For example, feeding oneself can be broken down into steps that begin with lifting a spoon and filling it with food to finally putting the spoon into your mouth. Hence, along with completing an action, the brain must also know what to do next. Neuroplasticity helps improve this associative flow and allows the brain to predict the next step.
Changes can be temporary or permanent: Initial changes due to neuroplasticity are temporary ad only if the brain determines the experience to be desired is this change made permanent. This is why when treating mobility issues, patients are not always able to repeat tasks in the same way.
Memory guides the learning: When making new neural connections through neuroplasticity, the brain is taught to discard unsuccessful attempts and only remember the experience of the successful attempts. From here, adjustments are made to improve the connection.

Neuroplasticity - 7 Things You Must Know About it!

Antibiotics are something which have changed are lives for eternity as well as for the better, to say the very least. With each day that passes, there are greater strides of advancement which are made in the field. Of late, it is said that antibiotics also have the potential to stop new cells in the brain from growing, which is quite a risk when it comes to their usage among people are sick.

Research has found that if the brain of the person under treatment is subject to sustained use of antibiotics, it is true that the brain can lose its functionality for a quicker time than what one would consider to be normal. So it can be said, this usually is not the advisable way to go.

Like most testing practices when it comes to medication, antibiotics which were tested on the brains of the subjects i.e. those of mice had an effect of mitigating their high-level memory. How this happened to be is rather interesting, to say the very least.

How dangerous can antibiotics be?
It is often said that eating right does wonder for a person s brain. Well, the mice that were not treated with the antibiotics were seen to lose the healthy bacteria present in their stomachs. In addition to this, they lost new brain cells. This led on to them performing worse in mental tests than their peers who had had some antibiotics administered to them on a consistent basis.

Now a cynic may point out that what is seen to be true for mice may really not hold true when it comes to humans being considered. However, if it is taken into due account that a lot of path-breaking research is carried out on mice, there is quite some credence to the results of the study.

To supplement the evidence even further, it was also seen that for mice which were in possession of low levels of monocytes, which are a type of white blood cells. It was seen that there was a great dependency on monocytes for the generation of white blood cells. The part of the brain which is hindered by generating new cells on account of the sustained use of antibiotics is the hippocampus.

Antibiotics are the proverbial shot in the arm which can aid recovery by destroying the threat to a person s wellness. However, it is to be considered that they are not safe in general as there is collateral damage!

Antibiotics - Can They Stop The Growth Of Brain Cells?

Obesity is the new-age lifestyle disease with multiple ramifications. While its effects on the physical aspects are very evident, the damage it does to the brain are more severe, though not obvious. Read on to know some harmful effects of obesity on the emotional well-being.

Leads to binge eating: There is a certain pleasure in eating sugary and fatty food, and this is lost with depression. Therefore, to get that emotional satisfaction, people tend to eat more chocolates, cookies, milkshakes, and other weight-accumulating food items, which further add to obesity. Greater the weight gained by a person, lesser the response or happiness from such food products.
Increases impulsivity: The area of the brain known as orbitofrontal cortex, which is in charge of controlling impulsivity, shrinks in obese people. This results in people eating more impulsively.
Affects immunity: Obesity is a major cause of inflammation, leading to damage in certain parts of the brain. This impairs the immune system, making the affected person more prone to infections and tissue damage. This leads to increased chances of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, sleeping disorders, eating disorders, etc. The chemical known as C-reactive protein increases as seen on MRIs in obese people, and which is usually seen in patients with chronically increased inflammation.
Effects on memory: As the BMI increases, there is a decrease in scores of memory tests. This effect is more obvious in women after menopause. With increased fat accumulation, more hormones are released, which affects the memory. Increased inflammation also affects cognition and memory.
Increased risk of dementia: With more belly fat accumulating, there is extra stress on the body to burn the visceral fat. This reduces brain size and causes certain hormones to release, which further affects the body s ability to remember things. It has been proven that people with smaller brain size are at greater risk for developing dementia.
Weight loss stress adding to more stress: When obesity sets in and the BMI goes up, there is an added pressure to lose weight, which further ups the stress levels. During these dieting days, the brain is constantly alert and finds ways to eat more. This also leads to excess eating. Moreover, there are indications that there could be genetic changes during this phase, which may leave a permanent mark in the person s composition.
Depression: When a person is not happy with their reflection in the mirror, the chances of feeling good and happy are very less. In this age, where aesthetics plays a major morale booster, an obese image staring back does not help at all.
So, if you have a risk of obesity, watch out. It is not just how you look, but how you feel is also altered.

Obesity - How It Affects The Human Brain?

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