[caption id="attachment_5210" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Peyton Manning"][/caption] According to the Boston Globe early this month, football superstar Peyton Manning just had surgery in Chicago for a pinched nerve in his neck.  While the details of his condition were not released,...

Congratulations to Dr. E. Sander Connolly Jr. from the Cerebrovascular Center for his recent induction into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI).  In existence for 102 years, the ASCI remains one of the oldest and most prestigious honor societies in medicine. The ASCI...

After a rigorous selection process, another round of Columbia University Medical Center Department of Neurosurgery doctors have been added to Castle Connolly's list of Top Doctors in the New York Metro area: Congratulations to Dr. Jeffrey Bruce, Dr. Neil Feldstein, Dr. Robert Goodman, Dr. Steven...

What appears to be a radical surgery to relieve brain pressure may prove to be the most effective and logical for patients with resistant high pressure conditions like Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension (IIH).  Drs.  Saadi Ghatan and Neil Feldstein from the Pediatric Neurosurgery Center...

Editors of the journal Neurosurgery have chosen to feature the Department of Neurosurgery in their Legacy series.  The article, The Centennial of the Neurological Institute of New York and Its Department of Neurological Surgery, 1909-2009: A Commemorative Pictorial Essay was written by Donald...

You don't usually call a man "lucky" after he wipes out on a snowmobile, breaks bones, and has to be medevaced to the nearest trauma center.  You do, however, when you realize just how close he came to severing his spinal cord.  Dr. Michael G. Kaiser from the Spine Center was this man's surgeon...

Dr. Peter Canoll, a long time collaborator with the Bartoli Brain Tumor Laboratory has just received a $1.8 million grant  for his research "The Role of White Matter Progenitors in Glioma Formation and Progression."  This grant comes from the National Institute of Neurological Disorters and...

Dr. Robert Solomon has been treating patients with brain aneurysms for a very long time and he has seen it all.  Some of the most challenging to treat, he says, are the amorphous or "giant" aneurysms of the basilar artery.  Researchers* at the Cerebrovascular Center recently pulled together...

The 2009 patient reviews have been totaled and our popular Dr. Neil A. Feldstein, Director of the Pediatric Neurosurgery Center, has been selected as a Parent Favorite with the Patients' Choice Award for the 2nd year in a row! Every month, over 40,000 patients rate the effectiveness of their...

In addition to all the other work he does, Dr. Jeffrey N. Bruce from the Brain Tumor Center has been extra busy writing these days.  He and his colleagues just finished a chapter on Skull Based Tumors for WebMD's eMedicine Neurosurgery Book.  About which he says, "Basic surgical approaches to...

When a patient asks,"Why does my back hurt?" the answer can take a bit of detective work.  Dr. Christopher Winfree from the Pain Center says that the exact cause is often elusive but there are six anatomical structures in the spine that are the most common sources of chronic low back pain.  He...

This month the Congress of Neurological Surgeons'(CNS)  University of Neurosurgery has chosen Dr. E. Sander Connolly from the Cerebrovascular Center as their "expert faculty."  All month, they are exploring the vascular subspecialty and on the 16th, Dr. Connolly taught a webinar course in...

The answer is YES!  There is exciting news on the horizon for cancer patients.  Dr. Jeffrey N. Bruce from the Brain Tumor Center has announced the start of Phase 2 Clinical Trials for a new vaccine to be used in the battle against brain tumors, specifically high-grade gliomas.  Gliomas are the...

Surgeons* at the Pediatric Neurosurgery Center treat a number of children with a neurological birth defect called Chiari Malformation (CM).  Increasingly, they are finding that the most risky part of their surgical treatment, that is, opening the dura, may not always be necessary.  They...

Our Neurosurgery Resident Dr. Raqeeb Haque has been doing great work here at the Department of Neurosurgery.  This year he received a Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation (NREF) grant for his research in peripheral nerve bypass surgery after spinal cord injury.  He worked on this with...

Imagine one day you stub your toe and the pain that would usually go away after a day or so, just keeps getting worse. Then the pain spreads to your whole foot which turns red and starts to swell. After a while your whole lower leg gets involved, you are having trouble walking and you can't...

Bill Clinton is reportedly recovering well after an angioplasty and stent placement yesterday for a clogged artery to his heart.  Dr. Sean D. Lavine from the Endovascular Center says, this same kind of procedure is done when people get narrowing in arteries in the blood vessels that supply the...

At the Pediatric Neurosurgery Section meeting held in December,  Dr. Richard Anderson and Dr. Neil Feldstein from our Pediatric Neurosurgery Center co-authored a study that  compared surgical techniques for the treatment of Middle Fossa Arachnoid Cysts (MFAC).  They looked at patients after...

In addition to his role as Secretary of the Board of Directors for the Society for NeuroInterventional Surgery (SNIS), Dr. Philip Meyers, of the Cerebrovascular Center and Endovascular Center, is the Annual Meeting Chairman of the SNIS 2010 Annual Meeting in La Costa, California this July 26th...

Amazingly, surgeons can take bone from one part of the body and place it in another and it will grow there.  Bone is one of the only tissues in our body that can regenerate in this way.  If you break your leg, for example, not only will the break heal but extra bone grows in. This is called a...

If you have ever seen someone in an intensive care unit (ICU), you have seen a lot of wires and monitors. When the patient has a brain injury there are even more. Electrodes are placed all over their head to monitor brain waves. This is called Scalp Electroencephalography (EEG) and doctors...

Snowboarder  and Olympic hopeful Danny Davis was recently released from a Utah hospital after surgery to fix a broken vertebra.  According to the New York Times, he would have been one of four members of the US halfpipe team.  But that dream ended after he crashed an all-terrain vehicle last...

More than 250,000 leading doctors were asked to name the nation's best physicians in various specialties – those "to whom you would send members of your family." The annual survey, conducted by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd. and published in America's Top Doctors, results include 9 of our...

A 48 year old man, we'll call Hank, fell off a ladder and broke his back.  He suffered a complete spinal cord injury and had no feeling or movement from the waist down.  Doctors were able to get him in the operating room within 48 hours of his injury where they performed an experimental new surger...

 Dr. Richard C.E. Anderson from our Pediatric Neurosurgery Center has just earned membership into the prestigious American Society of Pediatric Neurosurgeons (ASPN).  This highly specialized group of neurosurgeons is dedicated to the advancement of their field through education and by,...