From June 24 to June 28, the China Tour of Fellow of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina 2024 is held as planned at the Jiangmen Wuyi Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. After half a year, Prof. Bähr, a member of German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Director and Chair of the Department of Neurology at the University Medical Center Göttingen, gave a return visit as a visiting professor and conducted a series of academic exchanges activities.
Welcome Ceremony
The hospital executives and the team of Neurology, led by ZHANG Ling, Party Secretary of the hospital, held a welcome ceremony for Prof. Bähr.
Vice President YU Shangzhen delivered a welcoming speech.
SHI Qing, Director of the Department of Neurology, summarized the 2023 visit and the work over the past six months. Director SHI noted that although Prof. Bähr’s one-week visit was brief, its impact on the work of department was profound. Over the past six months, they had further studied functional neuroanatomy diligently, enhancing their skills in physical examination and image interpreting. Moreover, based on Prof. Bähr’s suggestions, they embarked on research endeavors grounded in clinical practice. After Prof. Bähr’s visit in 2023, the postdoctoral fellows of this department were deeply inspired with regards to scientific research, successfully got funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation.
Prof. Bähr remarked that through mutual efforts over the past six months, the University of Göttingen has officially admitted CHEN Jianhua from the Department of Neurology as a doctoral student. Doctor Chen is scheduled to fly to Göttingen in July to begin his three-year study doctoral studies. Prof. Bähr hopes that Doctor Chen will contribute to improve the clinical diagnosis and treatment, as well as the quality of scientific research of Neurology in Jiangmen, after his returning to China.
Furthermore, Prof. Bähr brought three English versions of his book “Topical Diagnosis in Neurology: Anatomy, Physiology, Signs, Symptoms” from Germany and autographed them as a gift to the Department of Neurology, hoping they can develop a deeper understanding of functional neuroanatomy.
After the welcoming ceremony, Dr. HU Shaowen and Dr. LIU Jinman, postdoctoral fellows from the Department of Neurology, reported the latest progress of the two projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation. Prof. Bähr provided detailed comments and suggestion for further research.
Teaching at Outpatient Consultation
Prof. Bähr offered teaching outpatient consultation every morning during his visit. All young physicians in the Neurology Department participated in this teaching clinic and briefed each patient in advance to facilitate the whole process of the consultation. For each patient, Prof. Bähr gave detailed physical examinations, consultation, interpretation of the radiographic images and lab test results, assessment of the patient’s condition, answered their questions, and put forward suggestions for further plan for diagnosis or treatment. Prof. Bähr encouraged young doctors to engage and think more with elicitation teaching and demonstrated the standardized diagnosis and treatment process of Neurology.
Update on Multiple Sclerosis
In the afternoon of June 26, Prof. Bähr held an internal teaching lecture in the Department of Neurology. Taking the case of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) received in the morning as a starting point, Prof. Bähr delivered a lecture titled “Update on Multiple Sclerosis.” The early disease characteristics of multiple sclerosis, such as relapse frequency and the number of MRI lesions, are respectively associated with disability progression and conversion to SPMS (secondary progressive MS).
Delayed treatment following MS onset increases the risk of progression to EDSS score four by 7.5% per year, while early treatment can reduce the risk of conversion to SPMS. Compared to milder treatments such as GA or IFNβ, initial high-efficacy treatment can significantly reduce the risk of conversion to SPMS by 34%.
The future treatment concept of MS is personalized therapy, which should take individual disease-driving mechanism, drug efficacy, and mechanism of action into consideration to select medications. It should also decipher heterogeneity of MS pathogenesis and stratify patients by their disease-driving mechanism, and develop strategies to predict a personal treatment response to an individual medication. In summary, early implementation of a highly effective treatment is desirable in MS, long term safety and tolerability is key to prevent continuous accumulation of disability over decades. Considering all these factors, from the current perspective, ofatumumab is a promising candidate to fulfil these requirements.
In the following case discussion, Doctor CHEN Jianhua from the Department of Neurology presented a ca