Current Diagnosis and Treatment in Neurology

J.C.M. Brust, ed. McGraw-Hill; 2006, 750 pages, $62.95.

This softcover book, Current Diagnosis and Treatment in Neurology, 750 pages, fills a need that trainees in neurology may have for a quick and concise description of central nervous system and peripheral nervous system diseases. Each disease and/or each symptom starts with a simple chart entitled “Essentials of Diagnosis.” The book begins with a short description of the major neurologic investigations (electroencephalography, electromyography, and neuroradiology) and follows with 33 separate chapters, each dealing with a separate disease state. Clearly the 13-page chapter on neuroradiology is not intended for radiologists because it is just a cursory survey of neuroimaging. The author of the book should have taken advantage of his neuroradiologist in other parts of the book because it would have avoided mistakes such as an inverted CT scan (Fig 11–3); calling a plain MR imaging a contrast scan (Fig 12–4); showing an inferior incomplete or inadequately labeled image (Figs 18–7, 26–5); calling a tumor “rim enhancing,” when in fact it is a densely enhancing mass with a central cyst (Fig 12–2); or an incompletely described figure in which there are other findings in addition to the one described (Fig 26–1).

Nonetheless for a neuroradiologist, this book could serve as a clinical adjunct to the numerous imaging textbooks now available, enabling one to find simple descriptions of many diseases, including pathogenesis, clinical findings, diagnostic studies, differential diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. The book would be most useful to a neuroradiologist in retrieving information on entities we infrequently deal with such as neoplastic syndromes, movement disorders, peripheral neuropathies, various motor neuron diseases, autonomic disorders, and muscle diseases. Strangely, there is very little on neurologic disorders of childhood. I suspect the main audience of this book would be medical students and first-year neurology residents.

• American Society of Neuroradiology