Executive Page

Neurology is a young and rapidly expanding field. This has many consequences - and ideas about a possible centrifugal development of neurological specialities are among them. Two major factors are facilitating the separation of sub-disciplines from neurology.

The First EAN congress took place in Berlin at the CityCube, June 20-23, 2015. 6400 participants from 106 countries were attending 8 Symposia, 25 Teaching courses, 23 Focused workshops, 5 Hands-on courses, 3 Interactive sessions, 5 Special Sessions and showed 1546 posters. Furthermore, 2 Scientific Satellite Symposia took place at the Charité, as well as 17 Industry Satellite Symposia. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

une 2015 is coming closer and the stage for the first congress will open on Saturday, the 20th. We expect more than 6000 participants from all over Europe and the world to come to the CityCube in Berlin, the brand new Berlin congress center, the venue of the congress.

Neurology is a rapidly developing field and many diseases have lost their poor or even fatal prognosis through scientific progress. Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, infections of the nervous system, epilepsies and many other diseases were barely untreatable only 50 years ago but can now be effectively treated and sometimes even cured. But all this progress needs to be brought to the patient. The providers who take care of this are the neurologists. Moreover, neurological disorders are among the most frequent diseases. This is increasingly recognised by the different European national health systems and luckily we have a constantly increasing number of neurologists in Europe. They are united in different national Societies and within the Academy at European level.

The wealth of scientific information is increasing and there are many ways to cope with this. Some of us are screening the most important journals for interesting papers as their way to keep up to date with the news in the field. Most of them give up after some time. Others restrict this to reading their specialty journals only or leave it to specific questions which they have to solve.

eatment of stroke has made tremendous progress during the past 3 decades. This is an excellent example how the introduction of new concepts and translational research has contributed to our field. The introduction of stroke units and thrombolysis with rtPa have been the main drivers of this outstanding development. But one patient group has always been left out of this huge progress. These were patients with large vessel occlusion, preferentially internal carotid, proximal media and combined media and anterior occlusions.

he number of patients with neurological diseases will rapidly increase in Europe during the next 50 years. For some of the neurological diseases even a doubling of the numbers of patients is expected. Therefore more neurologists are needed. One of the most important tasks of the EAN is to support all attempts to increase the attractiveness of neurology as a profession and to improve teaching for students, trainees and residents in our field.

Neurological diseases are seriously affecting life quality of the patients. Many of these diseases are followed by life-long disabilities or the patients even need care for the rest of their lives. Our daily work for the patients with neurological diseases transfers for politicians into costs for the Society and a recent analysis has found the annual costs for neurological diseases in Europe to be >300.000 Mio €¹, which is more than the annual budget of the German government.

The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award is one of the most important medical awards and goes this year to Mahlong R. Delong, Atlanta, USA and Alim Benabid, Grenoble, France for the ‘development of deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN-DBS), a surgical technique that reduces tremors and restores motor function in patients with advanced Parkinson's disease’.

The European Academy of Neurology has existed for 4 months now and many of the first steps are behind us. The latest step is that we can accept members now from the administrative side of the process. Therefore I will use my President’s Page today to explain why you should become a member. According to the bylaws of the Society we will have institutional and individual members.

The EAN is a young Society and our purpose is to promote ‘Excellence in Neurology in Europe’.  This task has many facets and one of them is to engage more people in the Society. This process is presently underway.

Neurology is an important discipline and is rapidly developing. Recent economic studies have identified that one third of the European population is affected by a brain disease and they need treatment by neurologists, neurosurgeons and psychiatrists. The costs for these diseases are getting astronomic.

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