Nottingham 2011 meeting report
The 55th Annual
Scientific Meeting of the Society was held in Nottingham, UK this
year. The venue was the award - winning Jubilee Campus of the
University of Nottingham, where all facilities including
accommodation were all on site. The Scientific Programme included
two pre-meetings on Wednesday morning: the usual neurobiology
meeting hosted by Hazel Jones and a new venture, a clinical cases
meeting hosted by Roger Strachan. Both were successful, and
the clinical cases meeting will be repeated at future meetings.
This gives those with more clinical interests, including surgeons
and physicians, nurses, physiotherapists etc, an opportunity to
present interesting or educational cases for discussion. After the
Annual General Meeting, the Opening Reception was held at the
invitation of the Lord Mayor of Nottingham at the Council House,
and we were given an impromptu tour of the private quarters not
open to the public.
On Thursday morning the main meeting was opened by Professor Ian
Hall, Dean of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the
University. He drew attention to the international aspect of the
University, which also has growing campuses in Malaysia and China.
This was appropriate as contributors to the programme were drawn
from 21 different countries.
The first session was devoted to hydrocephalus and shunt surgery,
and this was followed by one on factors causing neural tube
defects. One of these from Assam reported endemic anterior
encephaloceles in tea workers poisoned by pesticides, while another
from Ukraine reported an association between low level ionizing
radiation from Chernobyl and neural tube defects (NTDs). A worrying
concern was also expressed from Japan after the nuclear accident
there. The session moved on to studies on prevention of NTDs by
inositol, and an update on folic acid from Carole Sobkowiak, SRHSB
Spokesperson for Folic Acid. Thursday afternoon is traditionally a
social event and after a tour of Nottingham Castle (during which
some members dressed in mediaeval clothing) we visited a local
state school for girls where we were delighted by a show of dance
and singing before tea and cakes. We then moved on to the
traditional river boat trip, taking us along the River Trent to the
accompaniment of an excellent jazz band, food and drink.
Friday was along working day, beginning with a session on urology
and spina bifida. Session 4 included the Casey Holter Memorial
Lecture, this year given by Maria Cartmill, a UK neurosurgeon
working to establish a multidisciplinary approach prenatal
counselling for fetal CNS anomalies. The issue of intrauterine
myelomeningocele repair was addressed in a further paper,
then by a special lecture on the USA MOMS trial by Professor David
Shurtleff from Seattle. This session was very appropriately chaired
by Professor Paul Griffith, who has established a national focus of
expertise in fetal MRI, and Professor Peter Morris who worked with
Professor Sir Peter Mansfield in Nottingham when he carried out his
Nobel Prize-winning research in MRI development.
The first session after lunch was devoted to experimental
hydrocephalus, but Maria Cartmill and I missed most of this as we
were being interviewed by BBC Television. Following this was a
highly successful poster viewing led by Dr Hugh Richards, and the
final session of the day was on complications of intracranial
pressure management. In the evening we held the Society Dinner in
the Old Library of The Nottingham Trent University (Nottingham has
three universities). A guest at the dinner was Dr Stuart Adams, who
gave a short account of his invention of ibuprofen in Nottingham.
This allowed me to point out several other "world first"
innovations in Nottingham (other than MRI), including traffic
lights (gas - they exploded), the first tarmac road, the Salvation
Army, and an early 19th century corn miller
called George Green who became famous as a mathematics scholar and
introduced a new form of maths notation into physics. He taught
himself mathematics in his mill, and went on to become a Fellow of
Caius College Cambridge, consorting with Herschel, Babbage and
Peacock.
The Saturday sessions were one on current issues including surgical
preparation of the patient and neuropsychology, and the final
session on experimental neurosurgery and neurobiology.
Prizes were awarded for the best preclinical and best clinical oral
presentation and the best preclinical and best clinical poster, and
the president's prize was warded for the best translational
presentation. Details of these have been posted on the
website. We are delighted that many of those new to the Society
have expressed an interest in becoming members.
Finally, I would like to thank all in Nottingham who helped to make
the meeting a success, and all the presenters for a high scientific
standard and an interesting meeting. We are very grateful for the
support of our sponsors: Codman (Gold Sponsor), Surgiwear (Bronze
Sponsor), BBraun (Bronze Sponsor and Coloplast (Exhibitor) who
helped to make the conference affordable to all.
Roger Bayston, SRHSB
President
