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CT/MRI/PET scans

Genevieve - posted on 04/05/2010 ( 2 moms have responded )

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I'm just curious if anyone's child ever got a scan of their brain or spine that revealed a cyst or tumor affecting the functions of that area of the brain? My son has difficulty with language, memory etc and after a year we found that he had an arachnoid cyst in the left temporal fossa, that was about the size of a golf ball. The cyst occupied that area in place of brain matter. We didn't discover the cyst until he started getting headaches and severe pain behind his eye (the cyst was growing and pushing on his optic nerve). Due to the doctors misdiagnosing him, and having to suffer for so long with pain, I feel he has developed some depression.

I've also met a young lady who was diagnosed with BP and a lazy eye, turned out she had a bone tumor in her spine. Once she recevied treatment to remove the tumor, her symptoms went away.

I am wondering if any of you know of doctors that have actually ordered a scan for children with symptoms of mental health disorders before putting them on meds.
I am doing some independent research and possibly linking my sons neuro disorders to the cyst that he has. I have found out, that alzheimer's disease is often a misdiagnosis when people are left untreated with arachnoid cysts. Feedback would be very appreciated thank you

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Genevieve - posted on 06/01/2010

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For arachnoid cysts, all the med school textbooks say they are "incidental findings" however most patients have symptoms with the cyst being the underlying cause, most common is headache. There is also the famous med school line, "People walk around all their lives and not know they have an arachnoid cyst" is told to hundreds of patients around the world.

The PBS documentary called "The Medicated Child" they had a scanner that showed the blood flow to different parts of the brain, which could help in proper diagnosis. Here is the link:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...

I also took my son to a Neuropsychologist for testing and turns out he has trouble in cognitive function, but should improve in a year. He will follow up with another test in a year to see how the arachnoid cyst and his 2 brain surgeries affected him.

My best advice is to ask for the images on a CD and just tell the radiology it's for his primary doctor, or a second opinion, and also to get a neuroradiologist to look at the images.

Cindy - posted on 04/08/2010

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WOW! I have to wonder what the incident rate of this is. Compounded with the human error factor of radiologists not properly evaluating the films while doing the reported findings.



Several years ago my son had an MRI done. It was reported as normal. Since then the same facility did the same scan for my older son. I was well versed in his brain anomalies, yet they reported the test as normal. It took several phone calls from my rheumatologist and myself to the chief radiologist to get them to re-read the test with somebody who knew what they were doing.



This led me to question the validity of the report for my other child.

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