Brennan Lee Mulligan Sam Adams

Although it has only been over a year since I visited Dr. Brennan, I was not surprised by the amount of progress we have made. My son had me at “Patient Zero” when he awoke after suffering a serious head injury. When he struggled to “See” the injury, I turned to my mom, and we immediately set him up on an MRI, which we just recently implemented at the Hopkins Hospital. When I thought about Brennan, I thought about Brennan, his sister Sam, and their mother, Dr. Debra. Who knows, maybe this whole journey isn’t so easy for them just trying to heal after losing everything.

Brennan Lee Mulligan, the son of professor Patrick Mulligan, studied under legendary neurosurgeon and pioneer of brain surgery, Dr. Thomas Brennan. Brennan, who just this summer received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, is best known for his work with people with brain injuries and brain cancer. But he deserves a special mention for his pioneering work in the prevention of intracranial hydrocephalus in patients who had recently suffered strokes and other strokes. The very serious condition is treatable, though only with measures designed to protect the brain from swelling.

On Tuesday, Brennan tested his work at the hospital, where he did some of his most promising early work.

Brennan Lee Mulligan: I have done three, four, five MRIs at Hopkins. This one is good again.

At Hopkins, Brennan was one of the only neurosurgeons in the nation to perform an endovascular intervention to treat the hydrocephalus caused by intracranial vasculature obstruction. There have been a number of cases in the literature, but none as dramatic as the one that occurred in the summer of 2003. The condition, called “non-closed end neck cisterna magna,” or NCCE-M, is where cerebral vena cava (bypassed by the ICA) is not blocked completely, which can end up causing the brain to swell and produce seizures and uncontrolled fluid in the brain. There have only been 17 cases of NCCE-M since the 1950s that have been treated successfully.