UCSF's chief of pediatric neurosurgery, Nalin Gupta, MD, PhD, gives a quick lesson in the structure and function of the ventriculoperitoneal shunt, illuminating its many benefits.
The V P or ventricul perennial shunt is really our workhorse. In terms of treating hydrocephalus. There are other places we can place a shunt. None of these are as durable uh or as well tolerated or as easy to revise as a ventricular Perin shunt. And certainly, I would say probably in excess of 90% of Children with a shunt will have this type of shunt. There are many different kind of shunt uh types and designs. I tell people it's kind of like a car. Um However, there have actually been several studies that have compared different shunt designs, different shunt makes head to head. And so far there doesn't appear to be any significant difference in terms of what type of shunt you use. This is a very typical valve. The shunt itself is just a piece of tubing. The valve that's in series with that tubing consists of a little right, which you can see to the left and then the actual valve is towards the right hand side of this. It doesn't control the amount of flow per se. What it does is it provides resistance in the system. So what that means is that if the pressure rises upstream of the valve past a certain threshold, you'll get flow of CS F through the system. And when that pressure is below the threshold, you won't get flow. So the valve really in a sense regulates that, but it's usually almost always determined by pressure, not by the actual amount of fluid that's being produced.
