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LA STAMPA

Using Brain Teasers To Improve 'Wide-Awake' Open-Skull Surgery

Surgeons in Italy are testing new techniques to improve general anesthesia-free brain surgery. Patients are “trained” ahead of time and, during the operation itself, made to answer quiz questions.

(Dierk Schaefer)
(Dierk Schaefer)


*NEWSBITES

TURINHaving an open dialogue with your surgeon is critical for a successful operation. But at Turin's Le Molinette Hospital, doctor-patient communication doesn't just take place before an operation is performed. Patients also speak up during surgery - while doctors open their skulls and start cutting away at their brains.

Thanks to scientific progress, brain surgery operations have been performed around the world for several years now without general anesthesia. With anesthesia, there's always a risk that some parts of the brain won't wake up again. A patient's chances of recovery, therefore, are improved when doctors forgo anesthesia.

At the northern Italian hospital, a team of neurosurgeons and neuropsychologists have been improving the process. They began with relatively straightforward operations and, step by step, took it to a more complex level of surgery.

For La Molinette hospital's "awake" surgery, the patient goes through a long period of preparation before the operation. Among other things, the "training" involves getting familiar with the operation room and lying on the operating table days before the operation.

And then during the operation itself, the patient is required to work alongside doctors. The patient is tested with word games that require him or her to match nouns with verbs: car with drive, water with swim. Each right answer gives a green light for doctors to continue the operation, allowing them to remove tumors, but not the healthy part of the patients' brains.

Read the full original article in Italian by Marco Accossato

Photo – (Dierk Schaefer)

*Newsbites are digest items, not direct translations

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Economy

Lithium Mines In Europe? A New World Of Supply-Chain Sovereignty

The European Union has a new plan that challenges the long-established dogmas of globalization, with its just-in-time supply chains and outsourcing the "dirty" work to the developing world.

Photo of an open cast mine in Kalgoorlie, Australia.

Open cast mine in Kalgoorlie, Australia.

Pierre Haski

-Analysis-

PARIS — It is one of the great paradoxes of our time: in order to overcome some of our dependencies and vulnerabilities — revealed in crises like COVID and the war in Ukraine — we risk falling into other dependencies that are no less toxic. The ecological transition, the digitalization of our economy, or increased defense needs, all pose risks to our supply of strategic minerals.

The European Commission published a plan this week to escape this fate by setting realistic objectives within a relatively short time frame, by the end of this decade.

This plan goes against the dogmas of globalization of the past 30 or 40 years, which relied on just-in-time supply chains from one end of the planet to the other — and, if we're being honest, outsourced the least "clean" tasks, such as mining or refining minerals, to countries in the developing world.

But the pendulum is now swinging in the other direction, if possible under better environmental and social conditions. Will Europe be able to achieve these objectives while remaining within the bounds of both the ecological and digital transitions? That is the challenge.

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