Neurology

ACA, MCA, PCA, lacunar, Wallenberg. Match the deficit to the artery.

Small vessel disease in the internal capsule. Pure motor and pure sensory lacunar syndromes.

Where the big arteries break. Which floor of the brain goes dark, and what falls with it.

Four classic patterns. Four tiny arteries. Same trick every time: cranial nerve sign on one side, body sign on the other. That crossed pattern IS the brainstem.

Epidural, subdural, subarachnoid. Same skull, three different layers, three different vessels, three different death notices. By the end you will read the CT before they tell you the trauma.

CSF pressure climbs, the optic discs swell, vision flickers out for seconds at a time. No tumor on imaging. The body is doing it to itself, and the patient is almost always an obese woman of reproductive age.

Focal vs generalized, status, and the antiepileptic ladder. Phenytoin to levetiracetam.

MS, ADEM, PML, GBS. Central vs peripheral myelin loss and how to tell them apart.

Alzheimer vs Lewy body vs frontotemporal vs vascular. Pathology, presentation order, and the imaging that nails each one.

Thiamine runs four enzymes the brain cannot live without. Take it away, and the mammillary bodies are the first to fall. Give glucose without thiamine in a chronic drinker, and you just precipitated Wernicke.

Four lobes carry every function the brain performs. Kill a lobe, kill its function. Know the map, read the deficit.

Direct vs indirect pathway, dopamine modulation, and the loops that fail in Parkinson and Huntington.

Tremor, chorea, athetosis, dystonia, parkinsonism. The pattern recognition that wins boards.

Willis-Ekbom. URGE mnemonic. Iron-dopamine pathway. Pramipexole augmentation and the gabapentin save.

A young patient with a copper plumbing problem. The bile drain is broken, the metal piles up, and three organs pay the price: liver, brain, eye.

Myasthenia gravis vs Lambert-Eaton. Postsynaptic vs presynaptic, fatigue vs facilitation.

All 12 nerves, their lesions, and the bedside tests that localize the deficit.

SO4 LR6 R3, the cardinal positions, and the trochlear head tilt that gives it away.

The canal narrows. The walking distance shrinks. The shopping cart becomes a walker. Learn the one move that opens the canal back up.

Where the spinal cord ends and the horse-tail of nerve roots begins. Conus at L1-L2 in adults, L2-L3 in kids. LP at L3-L4 or L4-L5 to stay below. Conus medullaris vs cauda equina syndrome - one is symmetric and early-bladder, the other asymmetric and surgical-emergency.

Adult vs pediatric, supra vs infratentorial, classic histology. Glioblastoma to medulloblastoma.

One sheet of ectoderm folds inward and becomes the brain. A handful of cells peel off the edge and become almost everything else above the diaphragm. Get the split right and twenty board questions become one.

When the cerebellum hangs into the foramen magnum. Type I sneaks up on the young adult; Type II crashes the newborn nursery.

Missing vermis. Ballooning 4th ventricle. A head that keeps growing because the CSF has nowhere to go. Here is how to spot it on the prenatal scan and never confuse it with Arnold-Chiari again.

Open vs closed NTDs, AFP screening logic, spina bifida spectrum, folate prevention. Built for boards at 2am.