The Scientific Programme Committee for the 2019 ECTS annual meeting look forward to bringing you the top speakers and sessions for a festival of clinical medicine and public health within the ECTS conference in the magnificent city of Budapest. This will be a great opportunity for sharing your own research and quickly get up to speed on the latest in management of osteoporosis and other metabolic bone disorders in children and adults. It will also let you meet the ASBMR and the Asian bone societies without making an intercontinental journey.
As the clinical co-chair for the committee, I am really excited to announce a range of sessions that will help deepen our understanding of bone health through life, from the foetus through childhood and young adulthood to the oldest old. If osteoporosis is about peak bone mass and peak bone mass is about skeletal growth then adult bone medicine can’t afford to forget about cartilage. But maybe osteoporosis is all about bone loss and not about bone growth? When it comes to therapeutics, then, we will be providing up-to-date reviews and original studies on the newest interventions in the skeletal area as well. There will also be a special session marking the ‘Big Fifty’ anniversary of the Bisphosphonates and what the future holds for this the most widely used class of anti-resorptives after bone building drugs and biologicals have become widely available for us to prescribe.
Budapest will of course also host the biannual ECTS-ASBMR debate where the two societies compete for the Golden Femur Award by swaying the opinions of the audience to favour or reject a motion central in the bone field. This year, two top ranking clinicians, one from each side of the Atlantic, will give us their take on the evidence base in a session that always proves educational, inspirational and very entertaining. We will also offer you to take part in our clinical workshop session, jointly with the ASBMR, on osteoporosis treatment. A separate clinical workshop session will address phosphate and FGF-23, a rapidly evolving field with ever growing relevance for the jobbing bone clinician.
As always, the clinical programme is also there for you to share your research. We have a number of oral presentation slots and poster slots available for clinical and societal research and hope that you will be one of the researchers contributing abstracts to the meeting. You may do so today. However, the abstract submission does not close until the 14th of January as does the application for Travel Grants.
Finally, as always, the main Clinical Programme links closely into the translational and basic topics and in to the ancillary and pre-congress programme. For example, you could combine the life-course theme of parts of the main meeting with the pre-congress ECTS-ICCBH workshop on transition from childhood to adulthood. As a new initiative this year, parts of the East-meets-West programme continues into the main meeting including East-meets-West branded topics in the Clinical Update and Meet the Expert sessions to expand your opportunities to build research networks outside Europe itself and exchange clinical experience with colleagues from Asia. Join us in Budapest, the historical gateway to the East, for a clinical programme that will bring you top speakers and room for discussions and networking.