The first Girdlers' HRC Research Fellowship will be advertised in February for an April deadline, and begin in January 2000. Previously, candidates were proposed by the first Girdlers' Fellow, the late Sir Robin Irvine, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Otago. The current fellow is Dr Rod Dunbar, who is working on a melanoma vaccine at the John Radcliffe Hospital. NZ Study A safe and easily available drug may be able to reduce brain injury during heart surgery, according to a ground-breaking New Zealand study. Dr Simon Mitchell, director of Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine at the Royal New Zealand Naval Hospital in Auckland, carried out a small but ground-breaking trial of lignocaine compared to placebo in 55 Green Lane Hospital heart surgery patients.
Patients sometimes suffer brain injury, resulting in poorer cognitive function after surgery.
One of the causes is exposure to air bubbles that enter the blood from the heart-lung machine used during the operation, or from air left in the heart chambers after they are sewn up. Dr Mitchell counted the bubbles circulating in the patients' blood during the 55 operations, but neither he nor the surgeons knew at the time which patients were receiving the drug and which the placebo. The patients were given 11 neuropsychological tests and rated their own memory before, soon after and six months after the operation. Dr Mitchell's team found that, on average, the 28 patients who received lignocaine reported improved memory and showed improved performance in six of the tests compared to the placebo group. Significantly more of the 27 patients who received the placebo showed markedly reduced performance on at least one of the tests.