Published online February 1, 2006
PEDIATRICS Vol. 117 No. 2 February 2006, pp. e320-e321 (doi:10.1542/peds.2005-1934)
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Hot Brains: Manipulating Body Heat to Save the Brain

Tonse N.K. Raju, MD, DCH

Pregnancy and Perinatology Branch, Center for Developmental Biology and Perinatal Medicine, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Consider a disease with high mortality, severe morbidity, unknown pathogenesis, imprecise diagnostic features, and no known cure—in short, a condition with no hope. One can only offer soothing words and symptomatic remedy.

Then, there is hope. Anecdotal observations lead to a new hypothesis. A pilot trial indicates that 6 of 9 treated patients "unexpectedly recover." Larger studies follow and show 30% to 50% improvement. On the basis of what was looked for, the treatment is considered safe, and compared with the desperate condition of the treated, the risks (if any) are deemed tolerable. People the world over begin to offer this exciting therapy. Could there be a Nobel Prize in the horizon for the discoverer?

What was the disease, and what was the cure? The disease was not stroke, hepatic coma, or neonatal encephalopathy. It was general paresis of the insane (GPI), the dreaded neurosyphilis, and the magical remedy was "fever therapy," induced by injecting blood from malaria patients. This idea of "fighting one disease with another" evolved as recently as the 1910s, not in the Dark Ages.1–4

Enter Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940), a Viennese doctor who specialized in experimental pathology but chose psychiatry because he could not get into internal medicine. The choice, he noted dryly, "harmed neither [himself] nor psychiatry."1

An interest in the brain led him to . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Address correspondence to Tonse N.K. Raju, MD, DCH, Pregnancy and Perinatology Branch, Center for Developmental Biology and Perinatal Medicine, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, 6100 Executive Blvd, Room 4B03, MS 7510, Bethesda, MD 20892. E-mail: rajut@mail.nih.gov




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[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]