This Research Topic is the second volume of the Research Topic "Hydrocephalus". Please see the first volume here
Hydrocephalus is a severe threat to human health. Even after active treatment, most of the patients still have neurological loss, and some of them cannot take care of themselves, have low intelligence, and even stay in bed all their lives, which has caused serious psychological and physiological impact on the patients and a serious burden to the family and society.
Many factors can damage the CSF system and trigger hydrocephalus, including tumor surgery and hydrocephalus neurological diseases, such as brain trauma, infection, ICH, and SAH. However, ventricular enlargement can also occur with aging, neurodegenerative diseases, and internal and external pathological changes. Therefore, the diagnosis of hydrocephalus should also be combined with the patient's clinical manifestations and cerebrospinal fluid manometry. Even so, there is still a lack of a gold standard for diagnosis. Many patients are diagnosed with hydrocephalus and undergo shunt surgery, but the results are unsatisfactory.
However, for many patients with normal intracranial pressure hydrocephalus who are treated with dementia, urine, and stool dysfunction, walking difficulties, and other symptoms, it is difficult to distinguish from vascular dementia, Alzheimer's, and other diseases, and miss the only chance to reverse the disease through surgical treatment, which leads to clinical disability and even death. Whether to diagnose hydrocephalus, whether to need surgery, and when to operate mainly depend on the subjective experience of clinicians, which leads to the omission of many patients who should need surgery, and the results of patients who have surgery are not ideal. Moreover, hydrocephalus surgery itself also has many inherent complications. The ventriculoperitoneal shunt does not conform to the normal physiological structure of the human body, which has not only many complications but also requires a lifelong catheter. Many patients do not experience significant improvement in either imaging or clinical symptoms after shunt placement. In addition, there are still many patients from the imaging observation of noticeable ventricular morphological changes, but the change in clinical symptoms is not satisfactory. The above problems are mainly due to the lack of systematic diagnostic criteria for hydrocephalus.
We encourage the submission of Original Research Articles, Research Updates, Reviews, Opinions, and Meta-analyses (excluding Case Reports and Case Series) addressing the topics mentioned above, but not limited to these topics:
- The risk factor of hydrocephalus and the prevention measurement
- The individuality diagnosis of hydrocephalus that reduces the occurrence of misdiagnosis
- How to reduce ventriculoperitoneal shunt surgery complications and improve long-term outcomes
- Research progress on factors that can cause hydrocephalus or hydrocephalus-related diseases
Keywords: Hydrocephalus, iNPH, SAH, VP-shunt, Dementia
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