Neurosurgery in Afghanistan during "Operation Enduring Freedom": a 24-month experience.

Object: "Operation Enduring Freedom" is the US war effort in Afghanistan in its global war on terror. One US military neurosurgeon is deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom to provide care for both battlefield injuries and humanitarian work. Here, the authors analyze a 24-month neurosurgical caseload experience in Afghanistan.

Skull base neurocytoma: case report and review of the literature of extraventricular neurocytomas.

We report a rare skull base neurocytoma. A 44-year-old female with a history of focal seizure and progressive right-sided weakness sought treatment at an outside institution, where she underwent total resection of a "left medial sphenoid wing paraganglioma" in 1984. In 1995 after experiencing intense left-sided headaches for 3 weeks, the patient presented to our institution.

Biomechanics of spinal deformity.

The correction of spinal deformity may be achieved by a variety of methods, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. The goals of spinal deformity surgery include reasonable correction of the curvature, prevention of further deformation, improvement of sagittal and coronal balance, optimization of cosmetic issues, and restoration/preservation of function. The failure to consider all these factors appropriately may result in a suboptimal outcome.

Pituicytoma.

Pituicytoma is a rare, low-grade neoplasm that originates in the neurohypophysis of the pituitary gland. We report the clinicopathologic features of a pituicytoma arising in a 52-year-old man who presented with a mass and panhypopituitarism, clinically suggestive of a pituitary adenoma. The tumor was marked by a proliferation of elongated cells arranged in bundles and interlacing fascicles.

Clinical features of third ventriculostomy failures classified by fenestration patency.

Background: To evaluate strategies for treating endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV) failure, we assessed patients, clinical features at failure, and the outcome of VP shunt placement at re-operation, classifying patients by fenestration patency.

Methods: Thirty-six patients with failed ETV were evaluated retrospectively. All but 4 had cine phase-contrast magnetic resonance (MR) images at re-operation to determine whether the fenestration was patent, and were grouped into "patent" and "no flow" groups.