Weird Medical Facts

J.M. Barrie once said “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”  Can you imagine remembering ALL the roses EVERY December?  Can you imagine remembering pretty much everything?  That’s what it is like for people who having Piking, or Hyperthymestic Syndrome.

photo by gutter

In an article for the Wisconsin Medical Society, Dr. Darold Treffert talks about the different forms of extremely good memory.  He talks about memory where people memorize facts, music, geographic details automatically.  He says that they are mainly the result of savant memory, though he does qualify this in bringing up cases where the people with extraordinary memories were not savants, but mnemonists – people who retain images but can “turn off” and force themselves to forget the huge amount of data their brain collects and stores.

Then he tells us about Brad Williams, who has hyperthymestic syndrome.  Brad has been interviewed by Good Morning America, who calls him “the Human Google.”  His brother, Eric, has made a biography on Brad.  Called “Unforgettable,” the documentary is due out soon.

Brad is one of only a handful of people considered for study under the diagnosis of hyperthymestic syndrome.  The subjects are able to recall the day of the week for any given date, and are able to tell researchers all about what happened to them that day – what they were wearing, who they saw, and what public events happened that day.  Of the three people studied, two are left-handed, but scientists are not sure if there is correlation there, because so few people are actually diagnosed with this syndrome.

Do you know more about this?  Do you have additional information to share?  Please comment below!

More Medical Articles

• Sleeping Beauty – Narcoleptic or Schizophrenic? (0)
• Imaging and the Treatment of Lung Cancer (0)
• Facts About Hiatal Hernia (0)
• Facts About Atrial Fibrillation (0)
• Cancer Drug Steals Identity (0)

photo attributed to dsb nola

It might have been the apple that put Snow White into her death-like sleep, but a similar thing happens to people every day – without an apple.  It’s hard to tell what ails them, since there are two distinct conditions that share certain symptoms.

The conditions are catalepsy and cataplexy.  For conditions that it is easy to confuse, you’d think they would have given them more distinct names, but I’m sure there is some Latin-root action going on there, so who am I to criticize?

According to medial dictionaries, catalepsy is “indefinitely prolonged maintenance of a fixed body posture, seen in severe cases of catatonic schizophrenia.”  Cataplexy is “a condition marked by abrupt attacks of muscular weakness and hypotonia triggered by such emotional stimuli as mirth, anger, fear, etc. often associated with narcolepsy.

The symptoms that both conditions share is a loss of body control, the potential slowing down of body functions (such as breathing), and in both cases sufferers have been accidentally pronounced dead.

The differences are pretty different, however.  People suffering from cataplexy will have muscle weakness, slurred speech, and their symptoms are almost always brought on by intense emotional stimuli.  People suffering from catalepsy will go stiff and rigid, but their limbs will have what they call “waxy flexibility”, meaning that if you put their limb in a certain position it will stay that way – like you posed them.    In very rare cases catalepsy can be brought on by strong emotion, but usually it is caused by an illness like Parkinson’s Disease or epilepsy, and some have been known to experience it in conjunction with cocaine withdrawl.

In both conditions, the sufferer can either be unconscious or totally aware – trapped in an unmoving body and unable to communicate their mental state.  Catalepsy is sited as the condition Poe talks about in “Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as well as the state that Valentine Michael Smith reverts to in extreme emotional states in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

At least for Smith, the state was voluntary, whereas 100% human-born and Earth raised folks have no control over their condition.  Stories abound about people who have fallen into a cataplexic state while laughing at a funny movie, as well as people who have actually been taken to the morgue because their bodies were so still and their heart rate and breathing were so depressed.

Who knows what the creators of fairy tales had witnessed to give them the idea for Snow White to be in an apple-induced slumber – appearing dead to her seven friends, but it is possible that they had witnessed someone with cataplexy or catalepsy and put the intriguing condition into a story.

More Medical Articles

• Roses in December – Hyperthymesia (0)
• Imaging and the Treatment of Lung Cancer (0)
• Facts About Hiatal Hernia (0)
• Facts About Atrial Fibrillation (0)
• Cancer Drug Steals Identity (0)

Facts About Atrial Fibrillation

Northern Virginia is home to one of the world’s most respected surgeons for the treatment of atrial fibrillation.  Trained by the inventor of this cardiac surgery, Dr. Niv Ad practices at Cardiac Vascular and Thoracic Surgery Associates and offers residents of Virginia, Maryland and DC access to the most sophisticated atrial fibrillation surgical options available, including minimally invasive surgery.

Atrial fibrillation is a type of arrhythmia, or irregular heart beat. With atrial fibrillation, the electrical signals in the atria (the two small chambers of the heart) are fired in a very fast, chaotic and uncontrolled manner. The atria quiver instead of contract. The electrical signals then arrive in the ventricles in an irregular fashion. When atria do not contract effectively, the blood may pool and/or clot. If a blood clot becomes lodged in an artery in the brain, a stroke (brain attack) may occur. About 15 percent of strokes occur in persons with atrial fibrillation. Aspirin, warfarin, and cardiac medications may be used to treat atrial fibrillation.

For patients who do not experience relief from medication, there are interventional and surgical options for treatment.  In interventional treatments, a cardiac specialist called an electrophysiologist uses cryoabalation (cold energy) to create lesions which block the abnormal electrical impulses from occurring.

Sometimes, patients are not helped by either medication or electrophysiology procedures.  For these people, there is a surgical option called the Maze Procedure.

The Maze procedure is a surgical intervention that cures atrial fibrillation (AF) by interrupting the circular electrical patterns that are responsible for this arrhythmia. By creating surgical ablation lines in both atria the conduction of the erratic electrical impulses is stopped. This channels the normal electrical impulse in one direction from the top of the heart to the bottom. Scar tissue generated by the ablation permanently blocks the travel routes of the electrical impulses that cause AF, thus eradicating the arrhythmia. The major advantage the Maze procedure offers over other less-invasive forms of therapy is that it corrects all three problems associated with AF: it restores sinus rhythm, facilitates the synchrony between the atria and the ventricles and preserves organized atrial contraction.
The Maze procedure takes about 2-3 hours to perform and cures atrial fibrillation about 95 percent of the time.  The procedure can be performed in two ways, through a median sternotomy or minimally invasively.
•    Median sternotomy – Surgery is performed through a midline (mid chest) incision and involves splitting the breastbone.  This approach is offered to candidates for a combined procedure, such as coronary artery bypass grafting or valve surgery with indications for surgical ablation of atrial fibrillation. It is also offered to patients for a stand-alone procedure who are not eligible for the minimally invasive approach.

•    Minimally invasive approach – Surgery is performed through a small, seven centimeter right anterior throracotomy.  The entire Maze procedure is performed with the same high success rate as with a traditional, larger incision.
Some patients experience intermittent atrial fibrillation but still need surgical treatment.  For them, pulmonary vein isolation is performed through bi-lateral (left and right) incisions in the chest wall and the left atrial appendage is disarticulated.

More Medical Articles

• Imaging and the Treatment of Lung Cancer (0)
• Facts About Hiatal Hernia (0)
• Understanding Staging Lung Cancer (0)
• Sleeping Beauty – Narcoleptic or Schizophrenic? (0)
• Roses in December – Hyperthymesia (0)