Neurology conference to highlight latest advances

This year’s Neurology Update Meeting will be highly relevant for specialists and generalists managing neurology illness

The 23rd Annual Neurology Update Meeting, under the directorship of Dr Ferghal McVerry, will take place on Friday 11 October at the Canal Court Hotel in Newry, Co Down.

The meeting is a neurology education day that will be of interest to neurologists, general physicians, and general practitioners.  It is designed to be highly relevant for specialists and generalists who manage neurological illness, outlining the latest developments in diagnosis and treatment. These will be presented in a practical ‘What you need to know’ format consisting of short talks with clinical insights for the management of neurological patients.

Proceedings will begin with an opening address by Dr McVerry, who is a Consultant Neurologist at Altnagelvin Hospital, Co Derry. The hospital provides general neurology and some subspecialty outpatient clinics and ward liaison services in Northern Ireland.

Dr McVerry’s areas of interest are acute neurology, cerebrovascular diseases and stroke imaging.

Opening

Following the address, the first speaker, Dr Laura Best, will take the podium. Dr Best is a Consultant Neurologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. Her field of specialty is advanced treatments for Parkinson’s disease.

The title of her talk is ‘The complex Parkinson’s disease patient: When to consider advanced therapies’.

Next on the agenda is ‘A short neurological, commercial and political history of alcohol’, which will be delivered by Dr Mark McCarron. Dr McCarron has been a Consultant Neurologist in Altnagelvin Hospital since 2003, where his clinical work has focused on acute and general neurology and strokes. He is also an honorary senior lecturer in Queen’s University, Belfast. He first became interested in neurology during medical training at the University of Cambridge. He has evolving research interests in neurology from acute stroke, unscheduled care and cerebral amyloid angiopathy to neurology education and more recently, the causes of health and healthcare inequities.

Dr McCarron’s talk will be followed by an update on dementia, which will focus on the diagnosis and management of the disease.

The speaker, Dr Antoinette O’Connor, is a Consultant Neurologist at Tallaght University Hospital, Dublin. She is a graduate of University College Cork Medical School and completed her PhD at University College London. Her research has focused on investigating accessible biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, with an emphasis on early disease detection. She has completed a clinical Fellowship in neurodegenerative diseases.

This will be the final presentation of the first session of the meeting.

Bridging the gap

After a short break, the second session will commence. It consists solely of a lecture from the special guest speaker, Prof Simon Rinaldi. He is Clinical Director at the Oxford Autoimmune Neurology Diagnostic Laboratory, UK.

Prof Rinaldi was a medical undergraduate and postgraduate general medical trainee in Manchester. He moved to the University of Glasgow in 2007 to undertake a PhD looking into the neuroimmunology of inflammatory peripheral nerve disease, supervised by Prof Hugh Willison. Following two years of clinical neurology training in Scotland, he was appointed as a National Institute for Health and Care Research clinical lecturer in Neurology at the University of Oxford in March 2012.

During his lectureship, he developed models of immune mediated axonal injury and demyelination using human induced pluripotent stem cells.

The title of Prof Rinaldi’s lecture is ‘Bridging the gap: Dissecting the autoimmune nodopathies’.

In the last decade, antibodies targeting cell adhesion molecules of the node of Ranvier were described in patients with autoimmune neuropathies. These nodal/paranodal antibodies associate with specific clinicopathological features that are different from classical chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. Emerging evidence that these are pathologically distinct diseases has further prompted the use of more targeted treatment, such as the B-cell depleting monoclonal antibody rituximab, which has been reported to significantly improve functional outcomes in this subset of patients.

Prof Rinaldi has been awarded an MRC clinician scientist Fellowship to identify the specific antibodies responsible for the acute and chronic inflammatory neuropathies and to delineate their pathogenic mechanisms.

These nodal/paranodal antibodies associate with specific clinicopathological features that are different from classical chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy

Final session

The third and final session will take place after lunch. It will begin with a talk by Dr Jonathan Poots, a Consultant Neurological Surgeon at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. Dr Poots’ area of specialty is microsurgery and neuroanatomy. His talk will be a neurosurgical update on microvascular decompressions.

The title of the next presentation is ‘Managing uncertainty in seizure disorders’. The talk will be delivered by Dr John Craig, Consultant Neurologist, with a subspecialty interest in epilepsy, Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. He is also visiting neurologist to Daisy Hill Hospital, Newry. His principal research interest is in the management of epilepsy in pregnancy, in particular the effects of anti-seizure medications on foetal outcomes.  He is co-founder and principal investigator of the UK Epilepsy and Pregnancy Register and sits on the Central Programme Commission of EURAP – An International Epilepsy and Pregnancy Register.

The final talk of the day, which is titled ‘Cancer and neurology in the district general hospital’, will be given by Dr Aisling Carr.

Dr Carr is a Consultant Neurologist at University College London Hospitals, UK.

Her specialist clinical and research interests are in the inflammatory neuropathies, particularly chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, vasculitis and paraproteinaemic neuropathies, and neurological complications of checkpoint inhibitor chemotherapy. Her outpatient practice as part of the peripheral nerve service in the MRC Centre for Neuromuscular Disease at the National Hospital covers all inflammatory neuropathies, with multidisciplinary support from neurophysiologists, physiotherapists, and clinical nurse specialists.

There will be a question-and-answer session after this talk, followed by a closing address by Dr McVerry. This will bring this year’s Neurology Update Meeting to a close.