The Longevity Key

My background is that I have been a hospital medical doctor for 55 years. I qualified in Liverpool and did junior jobs in that area, then became a medical registrar at the world-famous National Heart Hospital in London, and then Senior Medical Registrar in Radcliffe, Oxford. From there I became a Consultant Physician in Leicester at the age of 30.

Throughout my career, I wrote various scientific papers but one was perhaps the most interesting. Soon after becoming a consultant, I had a patient with gross Parkinsonian features who was barely able to walk. However a recent “new toy” was a CT scan, so I decided to order a CT Brain scan. To my surprise, the scan showed enormous dilated ventricles (big spaces) occupying a lot of brain tissue. Pressure studies were done and I concluded Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. I then phoned a neurosurgical pal in Nottingham and he said, “Rob, what do you want me to do?” I said I wanted a ventriculo-atrial shunt (from the big spaces in the brain to the heart, to get rid of cerebrospinal fluid). The patient was transferred and when I saw her two weeks later she was bright, sprightly, had no Parkinsonian features, and was off all medication. With my registrar, we published a paper on this (in Thorax). So basically this was the first time in the world that Parkinsonism was due to Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. It is now described as one of the three important causes of Parkinson’s Disease – and really should be called Shepherd’s Syndrome!