Ayan Mandal's new book on proactive strategies to prevent brain diseases is published this month.
New advances in medicine are proving that maladies of the mind are not inevitable. We need to learn what can be done to protect our brains and those of our loved ones.
Ayan Mandal
How can we protect our brain health in the same way as our heart health? That’s the question that Gates Cambridge Scholar Ayan Mandal’s first book attempts to answer.
A Stethoscope for the Brain: Preventive Approaches to Protect the Mind is about proactive strategies to prevent brain diseases and is based in large part on Mandal’s PhD research at the University of Cambridge, which focused on the neuroscience behind how tumours spread within the brain and, in particular, on neural network science [the ‘connectome’].
The book is currently published as an e-book and will be available for a promotional price of $0.99 (USD) until 28th September. It will be available for purchase as a paperback and hardcover later in September.
A Stethoscope for the Brain blends the stories of people affected by brain disease with the science that saves patients’ lives. It includes the story of a sisterhood of Catholic nuns who taught the world the secret to preventing dementia; a French patient whose legacy guides our ability to treat strokes early; and military veterans whose routine check-ups led to a discovery that could prevent the most common cause of disability in young adults.
Mandal [2018], now a neuroscientist and medical student at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, says: “New advances in medicine are proving that maladies of the mind are not inevitable. We need to learn what can be done to protect our brains and those of our loved ones.”
Dr Steven Brem, Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Glioblastoma, has called the book “an instant classic”. He says: “Ayan Mandal brings a unique background of scholarship at the University of Cambridge where he published on neural network science (the ‘connectome’), glioma biology, and now at the University of Pennsylvania, a mastery of clinical neurosciences, so he is in a perfect position to meld the new science of connectomics as a lens or “stethoscope” to understand the human brain and neurological illness. His emphasis on prevention is laudatory and impactful. He has the gift of writing to reduce complex mathematical modelling of the human brain into easy-to-read, beautiful prose. This book is a “must” for all of us who pride ourselves on maximising the function of our own cognitive health and those of others.”
*A Stethoscope for the Brain by Ayan Mandal is published in e-book format here.
**Picture credit of brain scan: Martin420. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
