you're right, Blossom. It's a good thing Dr. Rosa, Dr. Flanagan, Dr. Zivadinov, Dr. Zamboni, Dr. Schelling and others are carrying on with this work. Here's a bit of history on how the NPH diagnosis first came to be. It was very controversial in its time, because neurologists were not looking at the mechanical connection to neurodegeneration. And a foreign doctor discovered it, treated patients without blinded trials and published his results. Sound familiar?
In the 1960s, a neurosurgeon in Bogota, Columbia made the controversial claim that he could
reverse neurodegeneration by surgically diverting an excess of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the brains of his patients with a shunt.
Professor Salomon Hakim first published his thesis in 1964 and then published 6 case reports of "normal pressure hydrocephalus" in The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the Neurological Sciences in 1965. Hakim rose to the forefront of academic medicine as he described a newfound ability to reverse symptoms of “neurodegeneration” that had long been considered irreversible.
http://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Ab ... re.21.aspxIt is important to understand that today, 60 years after Hakim's discovery, treating normal pressure hydrocephalus is an accepted practice, even though diagnosing NPH is an inexact science. There were never any double blinded clinical trials for this surgery. Hakim claimed he could reverse gait impairment, cognitive problems and urinary incontinence by diverting CSF flow. And the proof was in his patients' recovery. No one cries "placebo effect!" after a patient recovers mobility, cognition or bladder control once treated for NPH.
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