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HISTORY

Why does Denmark have the world’s largest collection of brains?

Almost 10,000 preserved brains, collected over four decades in the 20th century, are still used today by researchers in Denmark.

Why does Denmark have the world's largest collection of brains?
A researcher takes a box with human brain fragments from a fridge in the laboratory of the Bispebjerg hospital in Copenhagen. Photo: Sergei GAPON / AFP

Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark’s University of Southern Denmark in Odense, holding what is thought to be the world’s largest collection of brains.

There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s.

Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labelled with numbers, the collection was the life’s work of prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Strömgren.

Begun in 1945, it was a “kind of experimental research,” Jesper Vaczy Kragh, an expert in the history of psychiatry, explained to AFP.

Strömgren and his colleagues believed “maybe they could find out something about where mental illnesses were localised, or they thought they might find
the answers in those brains”.

The brains were collected after autopsies had been conducted on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark.

Neither the deceased nor their families were ever asked permission.

“These were state mental hospitals and there were no people from the outside who were asking questions about what went on in these state
institutions,” he said.

At the time, patients’ rights were not a primary concern.

On the contrary, society believed it needed to be protected from these people, the researcher from the University of Copenhagen said.

Between 1929 and 1967, the law required people committed to mental institutions to be sterilised.

Up until 1989, they had to get a special exemption in order to be allowed to marry.

Denmark considered “mentally ill” people, as they were called at the time, “a burden to society (and believed that) if we let them have children, if we
let them loose… they will cause all kinds of trouble,” Vaczy Kragh said.

Back then, every Dane who died was autopsied, said pathologist Martin Wirenfeldt Nielsen, the director of the collection.

“It was just part of the culture back then, an autopsy was just another hospital procedure,” Nielsen said.

The evolution of post-mortem procedures and growing awareness of patients’ rights heralded the end of new additions to the collection in 1982.

A long and heated debate then ensued on what to do with it.

Denmark’s state ethics council ultimately ruled it should be preserved and used for scientific research.

An employee works on human brain fragments in the laboratory of the Bispebjerg hospital in Copenhagen. Photo: Sergei GAPON / AFP

Hidden secrets

The collection, long housed in Aarhus, was moved to Odense in 2018.

Research on the collection has over the years covered a wide range of illnesses, including dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

“The debate has basically settled down, and (now people) say ‘okay, this is very impressive and useful scientific research if you want to know more about
mental disease’,” the collection’s director said.

Some of the brains belonged to people who suffered from both mental health issues and brain illnesses.

“Because many of these patients were admitted for maybe half their life, or even their entire life, they would also have had other brain diseases, such as
a stroke, epilepsy or brain tumours,” he added.

Four research projects are currently using the collection.

“If it’s not used, it does no good,” says the former head of the country’s mental health association, Knud Kristensen.

“Now we have it, we should actually use it,” he said, complaining about a lack of resources to fund research.

Neurobiologist Susana Aznar, a Parkinson’s expert working at a Copenhagen research hospital, is using the collection as part of her team’s research
project.

She said the brains were unique in that they enable scientists to see the effects of modern treatments.

“They were not treated with the treatments that we have now,” she said.

The brains of patients nowadays may have been altered by the treatments they have received.

When Aznar’s team compares these with the brains from the collection, “we can see whether these changes could be associated with the treatments,” she
said.

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HEALTH

Danish hospital made 293 cancer patients wait too long for surgery

Some 293 bowel cancer patients at Aarhus University Hospital waited longer than they should have to undergo surgery.

Danish hospital made 293 cancer patients wait too long for surgery

The Central Jutland health authority, which administrates the hospital in Aarhus, gave the figure in a review it released on Thursday.

The admission from the regional health board comes after broadcaster DR had reported that 182 patients with serious bowel cancer had waited too long for an operation at Aarhus University Hospital (AUH).

The period covered by DR’s reporting is May to December 2022, while the figure from Region Central Jutland is for January 2022 until February 2023.

Danish law requires cancer patients to be operated on within two weeks of the decision to operate being made.

But the Region Central Jutland review shows that the surgery deadline for patients at the department for stomach and bowel surgery at AUH was exceeded by up to 56 days.

On average, the two-week waiting time was exceeded by an average of 12.7 days for the 293 patients, according to the review.

“AUH cannot rule out that the extra waiting time for operations has caused a deterioration of disease in some of the patients who waited longer than the maximum waiting times,” the review states.

The review was ordered by the Danish Health Authority after the waiting time issue was reported by DR last weekend.

AUH’s stomach and bowel surgery is highly specialised to a degree that some patients with advanced bowel cancer cannot be treated anywhere else in Denmark, according to news wire Ritzau.

Failure to operate within deadlines is primarily a result of a shortage of nurses at the department, according to the review.

“The shortage of nurses has meant that it was necessary to remove beds for the entirety of 2022 at Stomach and Bowel Surgery, AUH,” it states.

The executive director of Region Central Jutland, Helene Bilsted Probst, writes in the review that the authority “looks on this matter very seriously”.

A number of measures have been initiated to ensure the department complies with waiting times, the review also says.

Region Central Jutland is set to meet with Danish Health Authority officials over the matter on Friday. Possible national measures will reportedly be discussed at the meeting, including a potential plan to ensure highly specialised surgical procedures can be conducted at more than one hospital in Denmark.

READ ALSO: What exactly is wrong with the Danish health system?

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