Heads up at Hoag

NEWPORT BEACH — The brain is considered by some doctors to be medicine’s final frontier, and Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian is on the journey toward discovery.

“We’ve learned a lot about other organs — the heart, kidneys, the liver — and now we’re knocking on the door to see how the brain works,” said Dr. Michael Brant-Zawadzki, medical director of radiology at the hospital.

Hoag announced Tuesday its recognition of the Hoag Neuroscience Institute as its fifth center of excellence, part of a long-term project to streamline neuroscience programs into one center for patient treatment.

With the population growing — and growing older — there’s more of a need for the comprehensive neuroscience research and treatment, Brant-Zawadzki said.

“It made sense to develop a uniform, cohesive program to care for brain disorders,” he said.

One of the institute’s core programs is working with the elderly population and caring for those with forms of dementia.

“Our greatest challenge perhaps is patients with dementia,” Brant-Zawadzki said in his Hoag office. “We’re working on clinical projects to diagnose it in the early stages so treatments can be tested.”

In 1997, the hospital became one of about 50 in the country to get a Gamma Knife, a noninvasive surgical instrument used to “cut off” brain tumors without cutting into the skull, said Dr. Christopher Duma, vice-chairman of the department of neurosurgery and medical director of the Hoag/UCI Gamma Knife program. Duma was recruited from a Los Angeles hospital because he had received special training for the radiation instrument during a fellowship.

“We said this is the natural evolution of something that should be designated as a center for excellence as a real programmatic phenomenon here at Hoag,” he said. “Of course our biggest dream was to actually have a building to house that.”

The doctors will soon have a center to call their own. Hoag is working with designers and architects to plan the Neuroscience Institute, which will be on the lower campus adjacent to the Hoag Cancer Center where the Kathryn C. Fishback Child Care Center stands today. The hospital has broken ground for a new child-care facility already.

The hospital has recruited a team of doctors, nurses and technicians who specialize in dementia, brain injuries, aneurysms, epilepsy, spinal-chord injuries and other brain-related disorders. Patients who are in need of neurological care can have all their doctors in one spot, working as a team.

“The collaboration among the various physicians is one of the unique aspects of the center,” Brant-Zawadzki said. “We can get together around the patients in a parallel process…. Anybody can have the technology — the technology isn’t the issue. It’s the broad spectrum of expertise Hoag has.”

Duma said he believes the program is one-of-a-kind in Orange County and sees it becoming the hospital to go to for neurological treatment, which seems imminent as he operates on what could be the most brain-tumor patients — about 250 per year — south of Los Angeles and north of Mexico.

“Eight or seven years ago the area didn’t have any neuroscience expertise. People would drive right by Hoag Hospital to UCLA or Cedars-Sinai,” he said. “It’s the community-minded aspect of the mission statement of this hospital. The mission of Hoag now is to shoot for national recognition.”

By keeping up with the latest technological advancements and partnering with organizations like the Adult Day Services of Orange County and the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, doctors at the institute hope to embark on more clinical research to determine where some of these brain disorders come from, how they develop and the best ways to treat them.

“Time is brain, as we say,” he said.