12th Congress of the European Federation of Neurological Societies

The 12th Congress of the European Federation of Neurological Societies was held in Madrid on August 23-26, 2008. Approximately 1,800 abstracts have been submitted and more than 4,000 persons have participated. Seventeen satellite symposia were available covering the latest therapeutical and diagnostic acquisitions.

The Congress was opened by the President of the EFNS, Jacques L. De Reuck and the first course was entitled "How do I examine...?". Professors Gil-Nagel, Quinn and Clanet spoke about the diagnostic in epilepsy patients, in patients with suspected Parkinsonism and patients with a multiple sclerosis, respectively.

On Sunday 24, we emphasize a session about Neuro-estimulation for epilepsy. According to Professor Wadman, deep brain stimulation is a successful therapy for epilepsy patients. However, as it is not known what the underlying fundamental mechanism is, it is unclear where the best location for stimulation is. It is needed distinguish between acute intervention in ongoing, just started, or about to start epileptic seizure and an approach where the main goal is to chronically decrease excitability and so reduce the likelihood of the occurrence of a seizure. Another interesting aspect is the applicability of closed-loop strategies where the level of stimulation is controlled by the state of the brain. Professor Wadman thinks that in epilepsy there are reasons to assume that continuous stimulation is not necessarily the best approach.

On Sunday in the morning, Professor Barbro B. Johansson explained the fascinating matter of the brain plasticity and stroke rehabilitation. According to Professor Johansson, training in specific activities of daily living, and starting within the first week or weeks after stroke are important key factors in stroke rehabilitation. The healthy brain has a large capacity for automatic simultaneous processing and integration of sensory information. Cortical lesions interrupt networks that combine different regions, and the capacity for automatic processing of incoming stimuli is reduced. Cortical sensory and motor representation of the hand exerts inhibitory influences on the motor opposite cortex in healthy individuals. Based on the observation of an abnormally high inhibition from the intact side in patients with cerebral infarcts, has been hypothesized that this abnormality might adversely influence motor recovery.

Applicability of neuroimagen techniques has been a topic very important in this Congress. On Monday 25, Professor Berg presented imaging techniques of basal ganglia disorders. However, SPECT or PET techniques are limited because they do not discern between idiopathic Parkinson´s disease and atypical Parkinsonian syndrom. Special MRI techniques, like diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and volumetry of the respective areas need to be applied.

On Tuesday 26, there was a session about Cognitive Neuropsychology. It was very interesting a presentation by Professor Khateb and collaboratives about the dissociation between the semantic relation and language effects in the bilingual brain. It is well known that behavioral studies report semantic priming effects as faster responses to target words preceded by semantically related primes in comparison to semantically unrelated ones. In bilinguals, this effect is observed together with a language effect, which is faster in responses to targets in the first than in the second language. They have investigated the event-related potential correlates of the semantic and language effects in bilinguals, concluding the dissociation between language and semantic relation effects in time and space.

For the author of this chronicle, the Congress finished with a session about History of Neurology. Professor Iniesta spoke about History of Medicine in Spain and the figure of Pedro Laín Entralgo. In a very beautiful presentation, Professor De Felipe stressed the contribution of Santiago Ramón y Cajal to the study of the cerebral cortex. One of Cajal´s favourite topics was the study of the cerebral cortex and, especially, "the butterflies of the soul", the term he adopted as a metaphor for the pyramidal cells. Dendritic spines were first described by Cajal in 1888. Two years later, he also described the presence of spines on pyramidal neurond in the cerebral cortex of mammals, suggesting that these structures were points of contact with axon terminals. Others were sceptical and considered the spines as artifacts produced by the Golgi method. In fact, the postsynaptic nature of spines could not be demonstrated until the advent of electron microscopy in the 1950s. Many recent studies have shown that the dendritic spines of pyramidal neurons are highly plastic structures that appear to be very important elements in cognition.

The session was closed with a presentation of a video by Professor Alberto Portera. Professor Portera emphasized a fundamental question for this blog: the correlation between neuronal functioning and social coevolution.

This Congress has been made possible through the generous contribution of many people. We acknowledge, especially, the organizing effort of the Professors Antonio Gil-Nagel (Hospital Rúber Internacional-Madrid) and Jesús Porta-Etessam (Hospital Clínico-Madrid).