News from NBCs and NAGs

Belgian Brain Congress review

The 3rd Belgian Brain Congress took place 24‐25 October 2008 at the Ostend Casino, a large, comfortable infrastructure at sea front offering a top class restaurant on its roof.  

Three hundred delegates enjoyed a rich blend of excellent scientific talks, stimulating posters, workshops including controversy and ethical issues.  Participants were a mixture of neurologists and psychiatrics with a majority of young residents and PhD students.  The success of gathering neurologists and psychiatrics at this congress is due to the fair and tireless cooperation between Jean Schoenen and Guido Pieters who headed the organizing and scientific committees.

The organizers particularly acknowledge Gianni Franco who managed to gather 14 Patients Associations. Each of them held a booth in the main hall and was an active participant in the workshop dedicated to the “Aidants proches”.

Scientifically the meeting was of a high standard with international and national reknown speakers. Main topics were consciousness, placebo effect, autism and temporal lobe epilepsy.  There were 4 controversy and ethics session, as well as 16 interactive multidisciplinary workshops. Axel Cleeremans gave a superb opening plenary lecture on consciousness, setting a standard that was maintained by Stephane Dehaene and Steven Laureys.  Numerous other speakers, including young investigators selected on the basis of their posters abstracts gave illuminating talks on a wide range of topics.  Another important feature was the Poster Prizes for which a special committee headed by Nicolas Zdanowicz took great care in selecting amongst 92 posters the 6 best posters of which the leading author received their prize at the very end of the meeting.  For those who are interested, all the abstracts are published in a common issue of Acta Psychiatrica Belgica and Acta Neurologica Belgica illustrating our aim to promote cross‐fertilization and downloadable via our BBC web page (see http://www.belgianbraincouncil.be/articles/Abstracts.pdf)

Besides the scientific program, the meeting was highlighted by the venue of Muriel Gerkens, federal deputy and chairwoman of the Health Commission of the Belgian Parliament. Deputy Gerkens spent half a day with us visiting the 16 booths of Patients Association and participated in the workshop dedicated to “How to optimize the management of brain‐diseased subjects in Belgium?”. A second highlight was offered by the participation of the artist Jan Fabre whose artwork “a crying and bleeding planet” illustrates the cover page of our program and the common issue of Acta Psychiatrica Belgica and Acta Neurologica Belgica.

All those activities could not have happened without the sponsoring of the following pharmaceutical companies: GSK, UCB, Janssen‐Cilag (major sponsors), Biogen, Almirall, Pfizer, Sanofi‐ Aventis, Novartis, Boehringer‐Ingelheim and Medtronic (minor sponsors) and the professionalism of MediPress.

 

Roland Pochet

General Secretary