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My name is Ben Warf
and I'm a pediatric neurosurgeon.
I focus a lot on infants with hydrocephalus and spina bifida
and other congenital anomalies.
Hydrocephalus is a condition of the brain which can be caused by a number of
different things.
The common factor is that the brain has fluid spaces inside of it
and these chambers
contain and produce the cerebral spinal fluid that makes its way out of
the brain to surround the brain and the spinal cord. And it's a very
delicate balance.
Hydrocephalus is anything that disturbs that balance, such that the fluid builds
up inside these chambers and
develops pressure, which is bad for the brain.
In the growing child, especially the Infant, what happens is the head is able
to expand, and it grows and grows and the child can get very large head
and that interferes with their normal brain development.
About half of children with hydrocephalus that are untreated
will have died by the age of two.
And most of the remainder are badly disabled.
When we first opened our hospital in Uganda, we were seeing lots and lots of
babies with hydrocephalus.
The most common treatment for hydrocephalus has been the same really
for the last 50 years or so and it hasn't
been much improved on. And that is to place a shunt,
which is a tube that goes into the ventricle -- the fluid space of the brain --
and travels underneath the skin down into the abdominal cavity.
Shunts are just prone to fail.
There's a different way to treat hydrocephalus which doesn't involve
placing a shunt, and
involves the combination of two techniques which we were the
first to combine. This combined procedure, this so-called ETV/CPC,
or ETV and choroid plexus cauterization,
we started using as the primary treatment in all babies with hydrocephalus
and were able to avoid shunts in the majority. So when we looked at that
in a very rigorous way we showed that it made a very statistically
significant improvement in the outcome. When I was in Uganda I started a program
called the
International Program to Advance the Treatment of Hydrocephalus and we
began bringing in
neurosurgeons from other developing countries who had a commitment to
to treating hydrocephalus in their own context
and bringing them in for two to three months and training them
in a very intense way
I was just finishing up a week in Rio de Janeiro. I'd been invited down to give a
series of talks to the Brazilian Congress of Neurosurgeons.
When I got a call my cell phone, a gentleman said he was from the MacArthur
Foundation. It's definitely going to
leverage what I've been able to do so far, and I think enhance the efforts
in hopefully significant ways. I don't have a detailed plan yet.
I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that I've
been given this wonderful award. So I'm very
thankful.