pancreas diseases : PancreasWeb

As of February 2006, Pancreatology is also the official journal of the Belgian Pancreatic Club (BPC), increasing the number of affiliated societies to 14.

The BPC has arisen from a common interest of several Belgian physicians in pancreatology. The aims of the BPC are:

1) To facilitate contact and collaboration between Belgian physicians interested in the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic diseases such as inflammatory pancreatic diseases, cystic lesions of the pancreas and pancreatic neoplasms
2) To offer a place for integration of basic and clinical research in pancreatic diseases
3) To initiate multicenter studies focussing on rare diseases such as intraductal papillary mucinous tumors and autoimmune pancreatitis

First of all, the epidemiology of pancreatic diseases in Belgium has been assessed by the initiation of a register of all patients hospitalized for a pancreatic disease in the medicosurgical department of gastroenterology in the Erasme Hospital in Brussels. From October 1999 to November 2005, 2000 patients have been included, of which about 50% suffered from chronic pancreatitis, 20% from acute pancreatitis and 20% from neoplasms.
Multicenter studies will allow the prospective collection of several cases of rare pancreatic diseases in order to investigate their pathogenesis, their natural history and to initiate some therapeutic trials.
Support is offered from the Laboratorium Solvay by providing the information technology to encode the database. Moreover, they also sponsor the triple membership fee for the BPC members, so that they can join the European Pancreatic Club (EPC), the International Association of Pancreatology (IAP) and the BPC simultaneously.
The BPC has presently 25 registered members distributed among 6 university hospitals: Erasme University Hospital, Brussels; Saint-Luc University Hospital, Brussels; University Hospital of Brussels, VUB; University Hospital Gasthuisberg, Leuven; University Hospital of Antwerp; University Hospital of Li鑗e.

For the second consecutive year, a BPC meeting has been included in the program of the Belgian Week of Gastroenterology which was held this year in Oostende from 9th to 11th of February. Two invited lectures, 5 free communications and 3 clinical case discussions made up the program of this session. The abstracts of the free communications have been published in Pancreatology (2006;6:175-179) and are available online http://www.pancreasweb.com/abstracts/abstracts.asp
The success of this year's BPC meeting encourages us to think that the number of members will increase during the following months and that the BPC could have a significant impact on a national and even international level.

http://www.pancreasweb.com/pancreas.asp?ak=Detail&zaehler=2795