News

A profile of Professor David Menon (Anaesthesia, Department of Medicine) has been featured within the latest edition of The Lancet Neurology. The article describes Professor Menon’s early life and work as a clinical academic since he was appointed in 1993 as the first Director of the Neurosciences Critical Care Unit (NCCU) at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Professor Menon’s research interests include neurocritical care, secondary brain injury, neuroinflammation, and metabolic imaging of acute brain injury. He established the first recognised training programme for specialist neurocritical care in the UK and protocols developed in the Addenbrooke’s NCCU have been shown to improve clinical outcome in severe head injury and rationalise the management of acute intracranial haemorrhage.
 
Believing that medicine should be more accessible to the public, he was also part of the BAFTA-award winning documentary Between Life and Death in 2011. Commenting on this film, about critical illness, death, and dying, followed three patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Professor Menon said, “I hope that viewers take away a sense of the uncertainties that medical teams sometimes face, and why good clinical care remains just as important in these difficult settings.”
 
In recent years Professor Menon has represented the UK intensive care community in discussions regarding the impact of evolving legislative changes on research in critical care and emergency medicine. He is currently joint lead and coordinator of CENTER-TBI with Professor Dr Andrew Maas (University Hospital Antwerp, Belgium), a large European research project to study traumatic brain injury (TBI). In particular, his research towards a better understanding of the complications of TBI form a significant contribution to a recent Series of four papers on TBI in this same journal: “I believe that we have to make what’s important measurable rather than make what’s measurable important.”