Professor R. Castellani (Northwestern University/ USA) with Radu Golban in Compass

Some say today that nose picking may increase dementia risk - a historical retrospective
Rudolph Castellani is Professor of Pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 2021. In our today’s talk show, we discuss about talents in the history of neurology. But why did we choose this topic? Since several newspapers recently report about the danger of nose picking in increasing the dementia, we should look at some historical aspects related to nasal lesions and pandemics which are today compared with COVID-19. We’re also looking at symptoms of a diseases which seem to have occurred four years before the official offset of the pandemic.
Dr Creutzfeldt’s first case. was a distinguished German neuropathologist during the first half of the 20th century. If one reads German biographies about Dr Creutzfeldt, one would wonder why a young physician interested in botany while travelling as a ship’s doctor then made up his mind to this sharp change in his career path. A few months later he started working in a famous clinic in Breslau. One of his patients there was Bertha Elschker, who was admitted with severe neurological symptoms to the hospital. Dr Creutzfeldt, a young German, who was not yet a neurologist, performed the autopsy after her death. The case would become famous in 1920, when Dr Creutzfeldt found the time, after specializing in neurology, to publish a report on his special patient. She was theoretically the first reported case of the later-called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, although on a clinical level none of the cases of CJD resembled to his first patient. Professor Rudolph Castellani is explaining Creutzfeldt’s report and believes that the cause of death was an autoimmune encephalitis one encephalitis lethargica. This finding is sensational, since officially the first case of encephalitis lethargica appeared 1917. Several neurologists compare COVID-19 with Encephalitis Lethargica. Was this the reason, why Creutzfeldt hesitate to publish his report?
The other remarkable talent was Dr Daniel Gajdusek (1923-2008), who investigated another similar disease, came under fire. He considered that such disease is produced by a “fantasy of a virus from the inorganic world”. We’re told that cannibalism transmitted the diseases. This was explicitly not the case. Gajdusek always pointed out at a different rout of transmission: mechanical lesions of the epithelial cells. The mechanical lesions of the nasal epithelial cells seem have been replaced with weird theories of consuming infected meet.
Not surprising at all that Professor Edwin Bramwell (1873-1952), another distinguished neurologist, who investigated encephalitis lethargica observed 1923 the same pattern. In his view the disease was transferred after a nasal lesion or a chemical lesion. Nasal swabbing was widely spread during the influenza pandemic, although now bacteria was transmitting the disease (Paul Foley).
And today? We’re told that nose picking may Increase dementia risk and that the cases of dementia are on the rise. Several articles are warning us against the socially inacceptable habit, although the authors don’t explain properly if the picking refers to something on does by himself or if he or she gets picked in the nose.
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