Thread by @IAmSamFin

@KrishnanSid @EricTopol @ScienceTM @amitayer @MatthewPottsMD @NorthwesternEng @NeurosurgeryNM Great paper. And a mini-thread:

50% of CSF shunts fail within 2 years, and each revision requires major brain surgery. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

My sister with hydrocephalus had >>100 such procedures, before dying at 26 from a series of infections *acquired from shunt revisions*

@KrishnanSid @EricTopol @ScienceTM @amitayer @MatthewPottsMD @NorthwesternEng @NeurosurgeryNM Most people haven't heard of hydrocephalus, but shunt revisions are the most common brain surgery done in children, in part because many hydrocephalus patients have to have so many. In the case of some, like my sister, the very attempt to get the treatment working can kill them.

@KrishnanSid @EricTopol @ScienceTM @amitayer @MatthewPottsMD @NorthwesternEng @NeurosurgeryNM It's difficult to describe the purgatory of not know if a shunt is working.

Think for a second: your kid has daily headaches and nausea, can't lift their head without unbearable pain, and has to stop out of school. But you don't know if replacing the shunt will help.

What do?

@KrishnanSid @EricTopol @ScienceTM @amitayer @MatthewPottsMD @NorthwesternEng @NeurosurgeryNM If a shunt *isn't working* and you *don't* operate, you live in misery (at best) and can comatose and die.

If it *is* working and you *do* operate, through the very act of surgery you just massively increased your chance of shunt failure, infection, and possible death.

@KrishnanSid @EricTopol @ScienceTM @amitayer @MatthewPottsMD @NorthwesternEng @NeurosurgeryNM Devices like that in this paper in STM offer hope to better inform that tradeoff and only do surgery if you have to.

But I hope by now you're convinced that **WE NEED TO DO BETTER THAN SHUNTS**. They haven't changed substantially in >50 years. They suck. And people are dying.