Romanian neurosurgeon awarded for discoveries in pain therapy

Constantin Tuleașcă is a neurosurgeon who left Romania more than 10 years ago, after starting to study in Iasi and who is now a leading neurosurgeon in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2016, he was the first Romanian awarded by the French Academy of Medicine for a discovery made in pain therapy. In 2022, he received yet another recognition from the Academy for further deepening and discoveries.

“This study was carried out on gamma knife radioneurosurgery, one of my passions. Mainly, we tried to go beyond the current standards, to propose something new. The current standard is to prescribe a certain dose of irradiation in cerebral arteriovenous malformations to cure them. I, through this study done in collaboration between the team from France and Switzerland, suggested that the time in which we deliver a certain dose of irradiation is extremely important and this was the basis of the study. This has not been demonstrated before. To translate to everyone’s understanding, gamma radiosurgery uses a certain amount of irradiation with a treatment dose that can be delivered in 20 or 120 min. This study said that if the duration of irradiation is shorter, the chances of cure are higher. It is not necessarily related to the harmful effect on the brain, but to the fact that there are certain reparative processes at the level of cells, which make the short irradiation time more effective”, Constantin Tuleașcă told Digi24.

The technology he describes is one known in the treatment of brain tumors. Gamma Knife is a form of radiosurgery that doctors turn to especially in the case of deep lesions that cannot be reached by classical surgery.

The data that Constantin Tuleașcă collected was from 149 patients treated in the last 20 years in Lille. The importance of the discovery will most likely not remain only in medical treatises, it will be applied in common treatments.

“We are currently working on a database of acoustic neurinomas or vestibular schwannomas. These 2 terms refer to the same pathology and we are trying to extrapolate what we obtained in the study awarded by the French Academy in benign brain tumors, in order to try to increase the effectiveness of radioneurosurgery and reduce side effects”, says the doctor.

He believes he can make a real difference in the field of neurosurgery and the healing power of medicine. “I believe in medicine, otherwise I wouldn’t have done this profession. I believe in the healing power of medicine, not medicine alone, but together with many other aspects that together help. Medicine has evolved a lot and it is important not to stay in the templates of 10-30 years ago. It is important to move forward. only believing we can bring something new, we will bring something new. I don’t take medical dogmas as absolute truths. Things evolve, techniques evolve and it’s important to get out of the patterns of the past and move forward”, said the doctor Constantin Tuleașcă.