All patients with subdural haematoma presenting to medical wards in Nottingham over a 5-year period have been reviewed. Of twenty-one such patients eight were first diagnosed at post-mortem, whilst all of the remaining thirteen patients in whom the diagnosis was made in life survived following neurosurgical evacuation of the haematoma. Diagnostic failure was caused mainly by failure to consider...

A 77-year-old man with an asymptomatic calcified chronic subdural hematoma is reported. Thirty seven years elapsed between the time of the head trauma and diagnosis. The advanced age of the pa tient when the calcified chronic subdural hematoma was diagnosed and the long interval between the trauma and diagnosis were both unusual features of this case. As far as we know, this patient is the olde...