Steroid refractory giant cell arteritis with bilateral vertebral artery occlusion and middle cerebellar peduncle infarction.

Giant cell arteritis is the most common primary systemic vasculitis in adults aged ≥50 years and peaks in the eighth decade of life. Common symptoms include headache, scalp tenderness and jaw claudication. Elevated acute phase reactants (erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C-reactive protein) are present in >90% of patients.

Recent technological advances in pediatric brain tumor surgery.

X-rays and ventriculograms were the first imaging modalities used to localize intracranial lesions including brain tumors as far back as the 1880s. Subsequent advances in preoperative radiological localization included computed tomography (CT; 1971) and MRI (1977). Since then, other imaging modalities have been developed for clinical application although none as pivotal as CT and MRI.

Paediatric intracranial anaplastic ependymoma: the role of multiple surgical resections for disease relapse in maintaining quality of life and prolonged survival.

Introduction: Ependymoma is the third most common intracranial glioma in children. The treatment of choice for these tumours remains gross total resection followed by radiotherapy. There are two principal histological subtypes, namely classic (∼70%) and anaplastic (∼30%) ependymoma.

External ventricular drain infection: improved technique can reduce infection rates.

Introduction: The placement of external ventricular drain (EVD) is a common neurosurgical procedure to drain cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in many acute neurosurgical conditions that disrupt the normal CSF absorption pathway. Infection is the primary complication with infection rates ranging between 0% and 45%, and this is associated with significant morbidity and mortality, prolonged hospital stay and increased hospital costs.This article compares and discusses the differences in rates of EVD CSF infection between clinical neurosurgical practice and the infection rates in a group of research patients where EVDs were sampled frequently as part of the study.