This site is written to help you follow a conversation with your doctors. It is not a substitute for one.
Nothing on this site is medical advice. It is background reading, written to help you follow a conversation with your own clinicians — not to replace one. If something here conflicts with what your care team tells you, follow your care team.
If you think you or your child is having a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department. Do not wait, and do not use this site to decide.
Reading this site, or emailing us about it, does not make anyone here your doctor. Dr. Krishnamurthy and the contributors to this site cannot diagnose you, cannot review your imaging, and cannot advise you on your own case through this website. We are not able to answer questions about individual symptoms, scans, shunt settings, or treatment decisions by email.
Those questions need someone who can examine the patient, read the actual images, and take responsibility for the answer. That is your neurosurgeon, neurologist, or primary care physician.
The patient education pages describe hydrocephalus in general terms: what it is, how it is usually diagnosed, and what the current treatments involve. They are written to be accurate for the typical case.
Hydrocephalus is not a typical-case condition. It varies enormously by cause, by age at onset, and by how the individual brain responds. A page that is correct in general can be wrong about you. Treatment thresholds, surgical choices, and what counts as a worrying symptom are all judgments that depend on the specific patient.
This site describes a research programme into non-surgical approaches to hydrocephalus. That research is published, peer-reviewed, and ongoing — and it is research. The ideas described in those papers are not an available therapy. There is no non-surgical treatment for hydrocephalus you can be prescribed today.
Specifically: nothing on this site should be read as an offer to enrol you in a trial, as a suggestion that any medication described in our papers be used to treat hydrocephalus, or as a reason to delay or decline surgery that has been recommended to you. Every treatment for hydrocephalus available in 2026 is surgical.
Published findings also get revised. A result that held up in 2018 may read differently after later work. We describe what each study found; we do not claim any of it is settled.
Some of our published work concerns P-glycoprotein, an efflux transporter, and the observation that common medications which inhibit it were associated with a higher rate of shunt surgery in a retrospective patient cohort. This is a statistical association in published research, not a clinical recommendation.
Do not start, stop, or change the dose of any medication because of something you read here. Stopping a prescribed drug can be considerably more dangerous than taking it. If our research raises a question for you, bring the question — and ideally the paper — to the physician who prescribes for you.
We link to other sites — the Hydrocephalus Association, PubMed, NIH, hospital and advocacy pages — because they are useful. We do not control them, we do not review their content on any schedule, and a link is not an endorsement of everything on the far side of it. Their accuracy, their privacy practices, and their advice are their own.
This content is reviewed by a practising pediatric neurosurgeon and we take its accuracy seriously. We still make no warranty that it is complete, current, or free of error. Medicine changes; pages lag. Where a page carries a review date, that date is when it was last checked — not a promise that nothing has changed since.
This site is published from the United States and describes practice patterns and terminology common in US and UK neurosurgical care. Diagnostic pathways, available devices, drug availability, and referral routes differ by country. If you are being treated elsewhere, your local guidance takes precedence over anything here.
Write to info@hydrocephalus.me. We cannot answer clinical questions, but we will answer questions about the site itself, and we want to hear about anything you think is inaccurate.