Question: How often are doctors/ researchers able to discover new treatments for the diseases or accidents that can affect the brain or spine

James Loan answered on 11 Jun 2020:

Hi Alex,

Because there are so many people working lots of different diseases, new drugs and treatments are being introduced all the time! This is one of the challenging aspects of being a doctor – you need to always be learning new things as new medicines are introduced.

However, if you are a scientist working in a lab (the other half of my job), progress can seem slower. This is because scientists usually work in a single disease area. However, it isn’t uncommon to identify a treatment that works for a condition in a lab environment – for example in a mouse, or a petri dish. The difficulty here is the process of turning a treatment that is effective in a lab into one that works in real life human patients. This is called research “translation” an is a really important field that sits between primary laboratory science research and clinical medical practice.

But to give you some examples: neurosurgeons recently discovered that removing a part of the skull to allow the brain to swell and to relieve the pressure after traumatic brain injury (like taking the top off a bottle of coke after shaking) can be effective in saving lives. Also, we have now found out that stimulating parts of the brain affected by Parkinsons disease using implanted electrodes is helpful for some patients. For conditions not needing surgery – say MS, lots of new drugs are being developed all the time to change how the immune system functions and reduce harmful brain inflammation. Lastly, there have been recent breakthroughs in treating stroke – which is commonly caused by a blockage in blood vessels going to the brain. If the brain doesn’t receive nutrients in blood such as oxygen and sugar, it dies, quickly. If you can get a patient into hospital fast enough, radiologists in some places can now put a wire into one of the arteries in your groin or your wrist and guide it up the affected blood vessel in your brain (think how far away this is!) using x-rays all the while to see where it is. They can then very gently pull out the blockage and therefore restore blood flow. This saves lives and prevents people having to live with irreversible brain damage!