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Professor Bas Bloem

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Professor Bas Bloem

Consultant Neurologist

Brief info

Professor Bas Bloem is a consultant neurologist at the Department of Neurology, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He received his medical degree, with honours, at Leiden University Medical Centre in 1993 and obtained his PhD degree in 1994. He trained as a neurologist between 1994 and 2000, also at Leiden University Medical Centre. He received additional training as a movement disorders specialist during fellowships at The Parkinson’s Institute, Sunnyvale, California, and at the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London. In September 2008, he was appointed professor of neurology, with movement disorders as special area of interest.

Professor Bloem is on the editorial board for several national and international journals and has published over 800 publications, including more than 700 peer-reviewed international papers. This includes a series of large clinical trials, all of which were published in high-end scientific journals. He has also supervised 51 successfully completed PhD dissertations. His H-index is 79 (Publons) / 91 (Research Gate) / 103 (Google Scholar).

Professor Bloem has two main research interests: cerebral compensatory mechanisms, especially in the field of gait and balance; and healthcare innovation, aiming to develop and scientifically evaluate patient-centred collaborative care. He also values the publication of remarkable observations in single patients.

Topic : CLASSIFICATION OF MOVEMENT DISORDERS

Movement disorders are commonly encountered in the clinic. In my presentation, I will provide a practical step-by-step approach to help clinicians in their ‘pattern recognition’ of movement disorders, as part of a process that ultimately leads to the diagnosis. The key to success is establishing the phenomenology of the clinical syndrome, which is determined from the specific combination of the dominant movement disorder, other abnormal movements in patients presenting with a mixed movement disorder, and a set of associated neurological and non-neurological abnormalities. Definition of the clinical syndrome in this manner should, in turn, result in a differential diagnosis. Sometimes, simple pattern recognition will suffice and lead directly to the diagnosis, but often ancillary investigations, guided by the dominant movement disorder, are required. In a presentation that is larded richly with videos, I will illustrate this diagnostic process for the most common types of movement disorder, namely, akinetic-rigid syndromes and the various types of hyperkinetic disorders (myoclonus, chorea, tics, dystonia and tremor)

Topic 2 : NEUROLOGICAL GAIT DISORDERS

This presentation reviews a number of cases which illustrate some of the diagnostic and communication dilemmas that clinicians experience in day to day practice in memory clinics.

Neurological disorders of gait are both debilitating and common. Adequate recognition of these gait disorders is important as this can offer useful clues to the underlying pathology in patients with an uncertain clinical diagnosis, such as those early in the course of neurological disorders. Medical teaching programmes typically take classic clinical presentations as the starting point and present students with a representative constellation of features that jointly characterize a particular gait syndrome. However, patients rarely present in this way to a physician in clinical practice. Particularly in the early stages of a disease, patients might display just one (or at best only a few) abnormal signs of gait. Importantly, these individual signs are never pathognomonic for any specific disorder but rather come with an associated differential diagnosis. In my video-based presentation, I offer a clinically oriented diagnostic approach in which the presenting signs are taken as the starting point for a focused differential diagnosis and a tailored search into the underlying neurological syndrome.

Topic 3 : MULTIDISCIPLINARY INTEGRATED CARE – THE PARKINSON’S CARE OF THE FUTURE

Chronic neurological diseases are the leading cause of disability globally. Yet, our healthcare systems are not designed to meet the needs of many patients with chronic neurological conditions. Care is fragmented with poor interdisciplinary collaboration and lack of timely access to services and therapies. Furthermore, care is typically reactive, and complex problems are managed inadequately because of a scarcity of disease-specific expertise and insufficient use of non-pharmacological interventions. Treatment plans tend to focus on the disease rather than the individual living with it, and patients are often not involved in clinical decision making. By use of Parkinson’s disease as a model condition, I will present an integrated care concept with a patient-centred perspective that includes evidence-based solutions to improve health-care delivery for people with chronic neurological conditions. I will also discuss how this integrated care model may help to improve the quality of life for patients, create a positive working environment for health-care professionals, and be affordable.</p?