Surgicogenomics

Last week I gave a talk to the trainees of the ASAP network and I used the term “Sugicogenomics” thinking that they would already be familiar with it. I was a little miffed to hear that no one had heard the word before. I thought that was a bit strange seeing as some of the people in that audience were on the forefront of all thing’s genetics. I then searched Google, which returned the following…

mmmm…..cake 😉

After some digging and asking around I learned that it was first used, as far as I know, in this paper from Marlys H. Witte:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4026306/

In neuroscience it seems to have been first used very recently by Prof. Alfonso Fasano et al. here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34602499/

The term, however, does seem to have been used in practice prior to both in this paper from Ambrosio Hernandez and Mark Evers in 1999 here:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/390431


So..??

In plain English it means to use what genetic information we have about a patient to try and assess surgical outcomes. In practice what this could do is help inform which patients should receive which kind of surgeries or where in their brains might be the best place for it.

For example, it looks like people with Parkinsonisms and a GBA mutation who have DBS implanted into their subthalamic nucleus (STN) might have faster cognitive decline because of the surgery. A fact that might have been helpful to me prior to my own DBS surgery in my STN just last June for my form of Parkinsonsism as I also have a GBA mutation. Oh well, we live and we learn. 😉

And with that, I hope, a new word can now enter common usage. Fly free new word, fly free.

3 comments

  1. Computers are LSD. No need to abbreviate when you can use TLA’s to represent each difficult typing chore (DTC) and then do a single edit pass (SEP) to substitute the real words for the fakes.

    LSD labor saving device
    TLA three-letter acronym

    What better way to alleviate the maddening abuse? I experience huge frustration when encountering science publications that have multitudes of TLA’s, many of which are obscure, NIH, and repeated endlessly with different meanings. (NIH – the key to never trying new things – not invented here.

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