Neurosciences - September 2016 Archives

It's time to tee it up at the Ryder Cup. Teams from the U.S. and Europe will put their golf prowess on display. Often, ...

For the better part of a century, brain tumors have been judged by their appearance. Where a tumor was located, how much it spread, and ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — When surgery and medication don’t help people with epilepsy, electrical stimulation of the brain has been a treatment of last resort. Unfortunately, ...

The night before 8-year-old Evie McLeish’s brain surgery, her Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon David Daniels, M.D., Ph.D., told her parents, "I don’t want you to think of this as the end. This is just the beginning of a marathon." The procedure was the start of Evie’s long-term care plan for treatment of a brain tumor. Along with the brain surgery, that plan included chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Due to her age and the location of her tumor, though, her doctors recommended Evie receive proton beam therapy instead of conventional radiation therapy. The timing was right. Mayo Clinic had just begun a new Proton Beam Therapy Program at its Rochester, Minnesota, campus. And not only was this unique treatment readily available to Evie, it was relatively close to her family’s home in Ankeny, Iowa, just a three-hour drive away. "We were dealt a big blow with Evie’s tumor," says her mother, Ali McLeish. "But there have been silver linings in this whole thing, including that we could get proton beam therapy without having to travel across the country." 

Results from the latest Mayo Clinic National Health Check-Up put cancer at the top of a list of American health care concerns. Survey participants labeled brain cancer ...

According to the National Institutes of Health, functional neurological disorders, also known as conversion disorders, are conditions in which you show psychological stress in physical ...

Jessie Brenholt is a certified pastry chef who would like to open a bakery one day. "If the ingredients were free, I'd give out cakes to everyone," she says. For a while, the 23-year-old's dream seemed to be in jeopardy. After months of being sick with weight loss, fatigue, nausea, vomiting and vision problems, Jessie found that the source of her symptoms was a tumor on her pituitary gland — a small gland located at the base of the brain that makes a variety of hormones. A neurosurgeon near her hometown of Hill City, Minnesota, found that the walnut-sized tumor was wrapped around Jessie's optic nerve and located close to a carotid artery. Treatment to get rid of it could affect Jessie's sense of smell and vision. Due to the complexity of the situation, the surgeon referred Jessie to Mayo Clinic's Rochester campus. "A pastry chef needs to be able to smell and see," says Jessie. "My doctors at Mayo Clinic understood my concerns and have been great about preserving my quality of life with surgery and proton beam therapy."