Patient's question:
My father had surgery for a brain tumor in May. He is currently confused, weak in his limbs, often vomiting, and frail. A CT scan performed by the hospital revealed severe hydrocephalus. How should it be treated? What medication should be used?Doctor's answer:
Hello, you should go to the hospital for systematic treatment. Non-surgical treatment is suitable for early stages or mild conditions with slow progression. The methods include:(1) Using diuretics or dehydration agents, such as acetazolamide, hydrochlorothiazide, furosemide, and mannitol.
(2) Repeated lumbar puncture or anterior fontanelle puncture to drain cerebrospinal fluid.
Which patients are not suitable for surgical treatment? For severe hydrocephalus with intellectual disability, blindness, paralysis, and significant cerebral atrophy where the cerebral cortex thickness is less than 1 cm, surgery is not recommended.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) treatment: Acupuncture therapy for this condition has not been found in ancient medical texts. However, modern reports first appeared in 1959, describing a case of a child who was cured after acupuncture at points such as Weizhong and Hegu. Subsequently, from the 1970s onwards, the acupuncture community began to pay attention to the treatment of this condition. In the past decade, there has been an increasing number of clinical studies with larger sample sizes. These studies have not only explored various stimulation methods, such as combining acupuncture with moxibustion using mugwort sticks, herbal thread moxibustion, and topical application of Chinese herbal medicine, but have also conducted in-depth research on the clinical patterns and treatment principles of TCM.
Initial findings suggest that from a TCM differentiation of syndromes perspective, patients with kidney yang deficiency show better efficacy, while those with spleen-kidney yin deficiency have poorer acupuncture outcomes. From a Western medicine classification perspective, acupuncture is found to be highly effective in treating communicating hydrocephalus with stable long-term outcomes, whereas it is less effective in treating obstructive hydrocephalus with poor prognosis.