It is said that a successful quiz question, whether in a departmental quiz or hit TV show, is where the answer prompts one of two responses, either ‘Yup, I knew that’ or ‘Gosh, I didn’t know that’. Papers in Practical Neurology aim to elicit somewhat similar reactions, though sometimes they also try to change the way we think about something that we already know.

Spontaneous intracranial hypotension, although first described in the 1930s, has become much more widely recognised because of its MRI findings, and its well-characterised clinical syndrome is now familiar to all neurologists. Many patients recover well when the condition is recognised and treated with an epidural blood patch. However, many do not. Manjit Matharu and …