From Behavior to Brain Science: Dr. Gunvor Kullberg’s Neurosurgical Legacy

The complexity of behavior has been an entrée for many into functional neurosurgery. For Dr. Gunvor Kullberg, this was very true. She started her career as a psychiatrist trained in Sweden and took an opportunity in the middle 1950s to work at the now decommissioned Newcastle General Hospital in Northumberland, United Kingdom (1). The hospital’s neurosurgery department was established in 1941 and, by 1962, it had grown into the Regional Neurosciences Centre. It was coming into its own as a leading provincial center outside of London by the middle 1960s, and into the 1970s. It was there at Newcastle General that Dr. Kullberg encountered functional neurosurgery and she completed her training under Dr. George Frederick Rowbotham, the founder of the department (2).

After obtaining sufficient training, Dr. Kullberg returned to the University of Lund, her alma mater, where she took up a career studying changes in cerebral perfusion after lesioning and stereotactic psychosurgical and movement procedures (3,4). She also performed early seminal work supporting the use of corticosteroids to treat brain edema associated with stereotactic procedures with CT imaging (5). Her work with inhaled Xenon133 supported the development of more modern techniques of PET and MRI perfusion sequences. Her corticosteroid work helped lay the foundation for the use of these medications to treat post-operative brain edema. According to one source, she retired in the 1990s and was living in Lund thereafter (1).

References

1. Heiden P, Pieczewski J, Andrade P. Women in Neuromodulation: Innovative
   Contributions to Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery. Front Hum Neurosci.
   2022 Jan 20;15:756039. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.756039. Erratum in: Front
   Hum Neurosci. 2022 Mar 17;16:859587. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.859587.
   PMID: 35126071; PMCID: PMC8811476.
2. Clarke PR. Obituary: George Frederick Rowbotham. Acta Neurochir (Wien).
   1976;35(4):313-4. doi: 10.1007/BF01406125. PMID: 793321.
3. Kullberg G, Risberg J. Changes in regional cerebral blood flow following
   stereotactic psychosurgery. Appl Neurophysiol. 1978;41(1-4):79-85. doi:
   10.1159/000102403. PMID: 365102.
4. Kullberg G, Risberg J. Changes in cerebral blood flow after stereotactic
   thalamotomy. Appl Neurophysiol. 1985;48(1-6):362-6. doi: 10.1159/000101158.
   PMID: 3915656.
5. Cronqvist SE, Kullberg G. Stereotaxic lesion as a model of brain edema. AJNR
   Am J Neuroradiol. 1983 May-Jun;4(3):722-4. PMID: 6410841; PMCID:
   PMC8334911.

Photo Credit

Heiden P, Pieczewski J, Andrade P. Women in Neuromodulation: Innovative
Contributions to Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery. Front Hum Neurosci. 2022
Jan 20;15:756039. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.756039. Erratum in: Front Hum Neurosci.
2022 Mar 17;16:859587. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.859587. PMID: 35126071; PMCID:
PMC8811476.

By Robert Bina, MD
Banner University Medical Center – Phoenix