I was talking yesterday with a friend about weird medical things we’ve seen school students have. She mentioned that she knew a 23 year old at her church who had water-on-the-brain and had a shunt installed there. I asked her what it was, and she didn’t really know, but it allows them to open here up and lessen the pressure from the fluid.
How does this work? Is it like a faucet on a cooler that lets the melted ice drain out? How do they put this thing in?
from the little I have heard and read about shunts, I think your explanation is a good analogy. I looked up shunts at http://www.altavista.com, and there are pages and pages of sites. Maybe you can find more information there.
Barring the “extras” used to keep it sterile and similar important stuff, it is basically a tube. Usually shunts refer to artificial blood vessels that act just as a railroad shunt or an electrical shunt works: it provides a temporary re-routing of flow (railroad cars, electricity, or bodily fluids) around an area of congestion.
By analogy, the tube you describe is probably set up in a similar fashion to a blood shunt. One open end of the tube is placed near the area where the excess fluid is collecting in the brain and the other end opens out somewhere to allow the fluid to drain. Usually this is into the throat or the eustachian tube, so that the fluid is not running down the person’s shirt (and is not open to infections from outside the body), but I am not specifically familiar with hydrocephaly, so I suppose that it is possible that it runs to a small external valve that someone may open or close specifically for periods of draining.
Insertion is done through a fairly normal surgical process.
My father had this done years ago for hydrocephaly. It is not an insignificant operation. In his case they removed 2" diameter holes on either side of his skull (later he looked like he’d had horns removed!) Shunts were installed on each side…basically thin plastic tubes with one-way valves that drained the fluid directly into his stomach. He was in hospital for a week, & it took some months to regain his balance & stregnth. A 23 year old would probably heal faster-my dad was 62.
The symptoms that brought him in were dizzieness & losing his balance.
There are 2 common types of shunts that you will hear abbout. The brain-stomach shunt for hydrocephaly, and a artery-artery shunt in the arm of kidney dialysis patients. The dialysis shunt recieves the needles of the dialysis machine.
I should add that the valve was not external & was automatically controlled.
There are many kinds of shunts but the one installed for the treatment of “water-on-the-brain” (hydrocephaly) is a ventriculoperitoneal shunt. It is indeed a small plastic tube with one end in the “brain” (actually in the ventricles of the brain which are filled with cerebrospinal fluid [CSF]). However, the other end is not in the stomach, Eustachian tube, or throat because none of those locations are sterile. The other end is in the peritoneum which IS sterile and is the abdominal cavity in which the stomach, intestines, float around. The tube has a one-way valve somewhere along it so that CSF can drain from the ventricles to the peritoneum but peritoneal fluid cannot drain the other way.
Yeah is right on. Here is a link that provides some images and explanations (just click on the “ventriculo-peritoneal shunt” hyperlink).
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While I was waiting for this thread to load, and knew only that it asked “What is a shunt?”, I began thinking of various types of medical shunts.
Did I even think about VP shunts? No.
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My friend’s daughter, who has spina bifida, has a shunt so that fluid doesn’t build up near her brain.
I’ve had a VP shunt since I was ten months old(19 years). It doesn’t really affect me when it’s working right, but unfortunately, it did have a tendency to break quite often when I was younger. I think I’ve had about seven surgeries to repair it. This last revision surgery has lasted seven years so far, the longest time I’ve had between surgeries. The one thing I’ve ever wanted to do that I couldn’t was scuba diving. I believe the pressure would make things go haywire. It’s not a pleasant thing when my shunt breaks. Much vomiting and head pain ensues. There is apparently a surgery that’s available to some shunt patients to make them totally shunt-free, but I haven’t gotten much more information about it because apparently the death rate is 5%. Way too much of a chance for something that doesn’t bother me much. Still I think hydrocephalus is one of those medical conditions that seem pretty bad if you don’t have it, but to me it’s not really that big a deal.
-Lil