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You wake up at 3 a.m., and your pinky feels like it belongs to somebody else. You shake the hand, wiggle the fingers, and the feeling slowly comes back. Most people blame the wrist. Or the pillow. Quite often, though, the real trouble sits about a foot higher, in the bend of the elbow. That…

It often starts with something small. You’re standing in line at the H-E-B, and a patch of skin on the outside of your thigh begins to burn, like a mild sunburn under your jeans. You sit down in the car, and it fades. The next day it’s back. Your leg works fine. You can walk,…

The room tilts as you reach for a coffee mug. Or the grocery aisle starts to sway somewhere between the cereal and the pasta. Ten minutes later it’s gone, or it lingers half the day, and you walk out of yet another appointment with “your ears look fine.” That frustrating loop is common. And for…

You’re sitting at a red light on the Tollway, and you notice your chin keeps drifting toward your left shoulder. You straighten it. A minute later, it drifts again. Your neck aches as you slept wrong, except you’ve “slept wrong” for three months now. A lot of people in this spot try a new pillow,…

Sometimes the change comes overnight. Dad has a stroke in March, gets through rehab, comes home walking with a cane, and everyone is relieved. By summer, though, he can’t follow the plot of a ballgame on TV, and he’s paid the electric bill twice. Other times there’s no single event at all. Just an MRI…

Lewy body dementia is a progressive brain disease caused by clumps of alpha-synuclein. This protein builds up inside nerve cells and disrupts thinking, movement, sleep, and alertness from hour to hour. In many patients, it first shows itself through vivid hallucinations, physically acting out dreams, or an odd back-and-forth between clear days and foggy ones,…

A headache that hits suddenly and reaches full force in under a minute is called a thunderclap headache, and you should treat it as an emergency until a doctor proves otherwise. The cause everyone worries about is a ruptured brain aneurysm, which bleeds from a weak spot in an artery, although other conditions can produce…

A mini stroke, or transient ischemic attack (TIA), is a brief interruption of blood flow to part of the brain that causes stroke-like symptoms, such as a drooping face, a weak arm, or garbled speech, and then clears up, usually within minutes. It doesn’t leave obvious damage, but it warns that a full stroke may…

An EEG test (electroencephalogram) records the brain’s electrical activity through small sensors placed on the scalp, and it’s one of the most common tools neurologists use to look into seizures, fainting spells, and unexplained confusion. It’s painless, involves no radiation, and the wires only listen; they don’t send any current into your head. A routine…

If you sleep a full seven to nine hours and still fight to stay awake at your desk, in class, or behind the wheel, the problem may not be your habits. Narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia are neurological sleep disorders in which the brain can’t hold a steady state of wakefulness, and both need a medical…