Leon Dănăilă

Leon Dănăilă (born 1 July 1933) is a Romanian neurosurgeon^[1] and author. He is a prolific author and has been responsible for a reduction in neurosurgical mortality at his hospital.

Dănăilă was born in Darabani, in Botoşani County, Romania. He is a graduate of the Faculty of General Medicine of Iaşi, as well as the Faculty of Psychology and Philosophy of Bucharest. He was elected a titular member of the Romanian Academy in 2004.^[2]

Education

Dănăilă worked for three years as a general practitioner with the sanitary district of Comănești and Dărmănești, in Bacău County. In 1961 he was appointed resident neurosurgeon at the Neurosurgery Clinic of Bucharest, where he has remained. He completed his specialty residency in 1966 and became a Doctor of Medicine - PhD - in 1973. In 1981 he was named a Senior Physician, 2nd degree, and became head of the Vascular Neurosurgery Department VII. In 1991, he was named Professor of Neurosurgery at the Bucharest Faculty of Medicine and Professor of Psychoneurology at the Titu Maiorescu University of Bucharest.

Dănăilă serves on the teaching board of the Faculty of Medicine at Bucharest, appointed in 1992. He has also been head of the Neurosurgery Department of that institution since 1996, in addition to President of the Romanian Neurosurgery Society since 1997. In 1980, Dănăilă was granted a Fulbright Scholarship, enabling him to work at the neurosurgery clinic of the University Hospital of New York. In July 1981 he travelled to the Netherlands for specialized studies in vascular neurosurgery and attended the Burdenke Neurosurgery Institute in Moscow.

Surgical career

Following his travels, Dănăilă was able to perform the most complex of neurosurgical operations, including occlusion of aneurysm of the arterial vertebro-basilar system, ablation of the third ventricle tumors, surgical management of skull base tumors, carotidian and middle cerebral endarterectomy, and extra- and intracranial anastomosis. He also succeeded in reducing operation mortality from operations to percentages comparable with those reported by the world's most reputable neurosurgical clinics. Thus the surgical mortality rate in Bucharest fell from 50% to 2-6% for acoustic nerve neuroma and from 49% to 3% for intracerebral aneurysm cases. These reductions were aided by the endowment of the operating theatre with a surgical microscope and laser. So far, he made over 23,000 operations, of which 10,300 used the surgical microscope and 800 used CO₂ and Nd:YAG lasers.

Works

In the course of his career, Danaila has communicated and published 317 scientific works, 59 of which appeared in foreign specialty journals. Works include "Logorrhea syndrome with hyperkinesia", "Ultrastructural changes of the cerebral substance and of the small vessels in the cerebral cortex determined by atherosclerosis", "The interaction of the two cerebral hemispheres in the integration of the language system", and "Histological studies of normal and pathological human cerebral tissue irradiated by CO₂ laser". He has authored 39 books and co-authored another nine.

References

1. "Leon Danaila – Recordman mondial in neurochirurgia vasculara". România Liberă (in Romanian). 20 June 2007. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
2. (Romanian) Membrii Academiei Române din 1866 până în prezent at the Romanian Academy site

External links

• Romanian doctor still working at 82 as colleagues head to UK