Executive Page

Dear colleagues and friends, I am writing to convey my very best wishes and sincere thanks to all, as we have wrapped up an eventful year and have shifted our momentum to the challenges that lie ahead: 2019. The past 12 months have been marked by noteworthy achievement and change. As we all reflect on the past year, I think that we have many reasons to look forward with enthusiasm toward what has yet to come.

Dear colleagues and friends, the weeks before the change of the year usually serve not only to accomplish the last pending tasks but also to reflect on the past 12 months and to think about what lies ahead. I probably have this in common with many of you who profit from some slowing down of work during the holiday season as everyone is busy preparing for Christmas and the turn of the year invites to look back and to make new plans.

Dear EAN members, Dear colleagues and friends, the political landscape across Europe and around the world is currently quite shaky and experiences a lot of turmoil, confrontation and egocentric behaviour. In this situation it is comforting that the “Neurological World“ does not follow this dissolution but rather moves in the opposite direction. There is increasing readiness for close collaboration and efforts to join forces among scientific societies and these synergies are critical for convincing decision makers of the benefits of supporting health research and other measures which help to assure the well-being of Europe’s population in the future.

Dear Colleagues, I hope that you are all looking forward to the 2019 EAN congress in Oslo, and that you are planning abstracts to submit! On October the 16th I attended an inspection visit of the congress venue, along with Franz Fazekas our president, Erik Tauboll chair of the local organizing committee, members of the EAN office team and representatives from Industry partners that are sponsoring our congress.

Dear EAN-Members, Dear colleagues and friends, I hope that you all had a wonderful and relaxing summer, and that you have regained the energy needed for being successfully back to work after vacation. I always enjoy when the speed and intensity of daily activities reduce a little over summer, and I am sure that such times are also important for rethinking projects, developing new ideas, and enhancing our creativity.

In 2 weeks, my sabbatical period in the United States, which started in April 2018, will come to an end. The word sabbatical comes from “Sabbath,” which in the biblical Old Testament was described as, “In the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest …” Today in Academics, it is obviously not simply rest. For me it was a break after 23 years of an uninterrupted hospital and university activity, 17 of which as chair or vice-chair of large neurological departments.

The mission of EAN is ‘to promote excellence in neurology across Europe’. Therefore we need you, our colleagues, to become individual EAN members. Membership is not only for your own benefit, but also to accomplish our mission. As an individual member you can play an important role. By standing for election for the position as Delegate in the Assembly of Delegates you can become an influencer.

Dear EAN Members, dear Colleagues, The 4th annual Congress of the European Academy of Neurology just held in Lisbon on June 16th - 19th was a spectacular event. More than 6,700 participants from 104 countries attended the meeting which covered the whole range of neurologic disorders in various formats, and offered altogether 42 scientific and 48 educational sessions. Besides several teaching courses and educational activities, the congress also comprised of 20 case-based workshops and interactive sessions, 7 hands-on courses, and 3 career development sessions.

The first team of board members is going to retire after the Lisbon congress and the incoming president, Franz Fazekas from Graz, Austria, will take over. He is an outstanding scientist in the field of Stroke and Multiple Sclerosis and has done a marvellous job for our Society during the past 4 years. His many qualities as an Austrian Cosmopolitan are a guarantee for an integrative presidency for the next years of further development of this young Society. It is my privilege to thank him and the outgoing board for an excellent collaboration.

As every year, spring time is high season for preparing for the annual congress - this year the 4th congress of the European Academy of Neurology in Lisbon. It is the annual main event of our Society and we expect around 6000 participants in this special and historically attractive Portuguese capital. The congress has continuously adapted its profile and one of the main goals of our Society is to continuously develop new formats which satisfy the requests of modern neurology and its drivers, the European Neurologists. Our program committee under the leadership of Prof. Boon has excellently realized this request with many new innovations.

Education is one of the key elements of the activities of the European Academy of Neurology. While the congress is well known to most of our members and European Neurologists the activities outside the congress are much less known. EAN has a special committee working on education[1] with Prof. Hannah Cock as the chair and the teaching course subcommittee under the leadership of Prof. Claudia Sommer. They are charged to develop an educational program including education for neurologists in training and advanced courses with the emphasis on training for the general neurologist. While the field of Neurology is getting increasingly broader it is of paramount importance to set a common ground for all neurologists which our education committee has carefully developed. For the congress educational programme, a five-year curriculum of the educational content covering all relevant topics has been developed over the past 3 years and parts of this plan are also applied to the educational activities outside the congress.

Neurological diseases have a very different frequency. Neurological practice and brain research need to have this in mind. The global burden of disease study has shown that neurologic diseases are the leading cause group of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) of all medical disease groups in 2015 with 10.2% of global DALYs. Table 1 shows the age-standardized rates of DALYs, deaths and the prevalence of the different neurologic diseases.1 In this schematic rare neurological diseases are mostly covered within the category ‘other neurological diseases’. The prevalence cannot be estimated based on the available data. However, the number of existing rare neurological diseases is very large. The current website of the NIH lists 1244 neurologic rare diseases which is the largest number among all rare disease groups and covers approximately 60% of rare diseases.2 These more than 1200 diseases produce more than 0.9% of the neurological DALYs world-wide which seems at first glance to be relatively small.

The past year has been a good year for neurology. With the major progress for neurological treatments and the aging of the population, neurology is becoming one of the key disciplines of medicine. Its organized bodies like the World Federation of Neurology, the regional societies in America, Asia and Europe as well as the specialty societies for stroke, movement disorders, dementia, multiple sclerosis and many other diseases are becoming the key drivers of this development.

It is not new that human disease is imposing a burden on the sufferers and a challenge for the physician. While neurologists are having the privilege being physicians and have the single patient in our focus of attention, health economists take a different view. Their thinking is focusing on the burden of disease for the society and its economic implications. They look at the costs of disease in different terms. The classical measures for the burden of disease are the costs in terms of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) which are defined as the sum of years of life lost due to the disease (YLLs) and years lived with the disease (YLDs) accounting for reduced life time with good quality of life due to the disability. Another important measure is the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) reflecting economic and educational development. There is big science behind all these calculations which I will not go into detail here.

Under the leadership of Jes Olesen, Denmark, the European Brain Council (EBC) has developed a ‘cost of brain disease’ project in the last decade, which essentially became one of the most important databases for the development of European Research policy. In 2012 the costs for neurological disease alone were estimated to be 303 billion €/year and the costs for all brain diseases added up to 798 billion €/year, which is about 6 times the budget of the European Union.