How glad I am that 2020 is behind us! I am not a child, I know that the calendar boundary between years does not bring the expected magical changes, but... the past year was very disturbing, crisis, and for some even dramatic.

Therefore, I enter 2021 with hope: may it be kinder to us! This issue of NON NOCERE is dedicated to neurology. And again – with a focus on our practice, on the general practitioner who sees so many patients with cognitive impairment, tremors, pain syndromes, dizziness and more.

I remember many years ago when a patient was admitted to my room who had suffered 13 or 15 transient ischemic attacks in the last couple of years. The neurologists knew him like the back of their hand. He came to me with a 10-story diagnosis (GB III, IBS, CVD, ten chronic diseases), with two words in the last place: Waldenström's disease. And I didn't know what this disease was, I had never met it. So I sat down to read... And what do you think? All the sources perfectly described “cerebral para-proteinemic crises”! Abnormal proteins create stasis in the cerebral arteries, which are then punctured by blood flow. Two years of endless hospitalizations with TIAs might not have happened if someone before me had moved Waldenström's disease from the last place in the diagnosis to the first. In the end, one session of plasmapheresis was enough to dramatically change the neurologic prognosis!

Read about what other somatic diseases can hide behind neurological masks in this issue!

Prof. I.V. Egorov