The week where naming the mechanism decides the treatment, and where two interventions with impeccable physiology turn out not to help. Both lessons are worth more than any single fact in them.
01
What this is
no new material
**No new material. Harder questions.**
Day 09 gave you three kinds of swelling that are not variations on a theme, and one drug that touches exactly one of them. Day 10 gave you the reason osmotherapy works at all and albumin does not. Day 11 gave you an intervention that reaches deeper than any anaesthetic and produced no benefit. Day 12 gave you a drainage system whose most important number is a height on a pole.
Two of these days are about the gap between a mechanism and an outcome, and that gap is the single most transferable idea in the rotation. Watch for it in the questions below — and then watch for it in week four, where it appears again with different drugs.
Answer first, then read. Checking the day before answering turns retrieval
practice into rereading, and the two feel identical while you are doing them.
03
The questions
9 of 10 application or analysis
Item 1Analysis Neuro 1 · Week 3
A patient has obstructive hydrocephalus with periventricular white matter change on imaging. What kind of oedema is that, and what treats it?
Item 2Application Neuro 1 · Week 3
Dexamethasone is proposed for a patient with cerebral oedema after a large middle cerebral artery infarct. What is the correct response?
Item 3Analysis Neuro 1 · Week 3
Why does the same litre of fluid behave differently at a peripheral capillary and at the blood-brain barrier?
Item 4Application Neuro 1 · Week 3
A hypovolaemic patient with raised intracranial pressure needs brain relaxation. Which agent, and why?
Item 5Analysis Neuro 1 · Week 3
Where specifically has mannitol been shown to leak across the blood-brain barrier, and what does that predict?
Item 6Analysis Neuro 1 · Week 3
Why can an anaesthetic not reduce cerebral metabolic rate as far as hypothermia does?
Item 7Analysis Neuro 1 · Week 3
Hypothermia has the deepest mechanistic rationale of any protective strategy in this curriculum. What happened when it was tested?
Item 8Application Neuro 1 · Week 3
An external ventricular drain chamber is raised from 10 cm to 20 cm above the foramen of Monro. What has changed for the patient?
Item 9Recall Neuro 1 · Week 3
At approximately what rate is cerebrospinal fluid produced, and why does the figure matter?
Item 10Analysis Neuro 1 · Week 3
Which pair of claims from this week share the same underlying lesson?