30th International Medical Advisory Group Conference
Brussels, Belgium — October 13-16, 2002
The 30th International Medical Advisory Group (IMAG) Conference was hosted by the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) in Brussels, Belgium on October 13-16, 2002. The IMAG is an annual gathering of international delegates from the scientific community, government and industry. The conference was originally scheduled for October of 2001, but was postponed in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Therefore, the large attendance—124 delegates from 19 countries— was a testament to the hard work of the conference organizers in keeping momentum and interest high.
The conference program was organized into nine topical sessions addressing a spectrum of issues related to alcohol consumption, health and behavior. After a welcome by BBPA chairman Anthony Fuller and chairman of the BBPA medical advisors, Professor Oliver James, Professor Phillippe de Witte from the University of Louvain, Belgium, gave the keynote speech on “Biomedical Research on Alcoholism.” The keynote provided a fitting introduction to the first session on “Alcohol and Vascular Disease.” This session featured five speakers who discussed various aspects of the relationship of alcohol consumption to cardiovascular health. One of the highlights was a review by Professor Serge Renaud, who first presented the “French Paradox” theory. Prof. Renaud gave an overview of research, including some of his own, on the effects of alcohol consumption— particularly that of wine—on cardiovascular and all-cause mortality.
Following were two short sessions on “Education of Medical Professionals” and “Approaches to Treatment.” The first session provided a glimpse of medical education related to alcohol in the U.K., and was interesting in that it explored the roles of both doctors and nurses in alcohol-related medical education and policy. The second session touched on treatment issues, first with a talk on European clinical studies of the medicine Acamprosate and its effectiveness on dependence and withdrawal symptoms. The session also featured a discussion of brief interventions in the primary care setting.
The next three sessions focused on specific medical issues related to alcohol consumption. The first featured several presentations on the liver, which covered a wide spectrum of knowledge on alcoholic liver disease, including an epidemiologic review of disease incidence and progression, and the roles of obesity and genetic factors. The session ended with an overview of the European experience with liver transplantation. The next session provided two differing views of alcohol and bone, one on the varying effects of alcohol consumption patterns on the development of osteoporosis and the other on the nutritional effects of beer on bone health. Finally, “Alcohol and Cancer” was the topic of the third session, during which the talks focused on cellular mechanisms of cancer, moderate alcohol consumption and cancer risk, and the role of alcohol metabolism on digestive tract cancers.
“Alcohol and Driving” and “The Contribution of Alcohol to Emergency Medicine” were the topics of the following sessions. In the first session, the talks ranged from an evaluation of the effects of alcohol in combination with other substances on driving performance to an overview of the effectiveness of various policy and punitive measures on drinking and driving behavior. The session on emergency medicine focused on the relationship of alcohol to suicide and the role that alcohol consumption plays in health service usage, and particularly emergency department admissions.
The final session of the conference featured several perspectives on “Alcohol and Young People.” Among the presentations was a review of the “harm minimization” approach to reducing alcohol-related problems, specifically in younger drinkers, that evaluated the effectiveness of various harm minimization initiatives. Another talk focused on adolescent drinking habits in Europe, both overall and throughout different countries over time. This presentation also reviewed several longitudinal studies of youth drinking behavior and assessed the impact of different influences on this behavior.
The conference came to a close with two final presentations. The first was an address by David Byrne, Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection for the European Union. In his address, Commissioner Byrne gave an overview of alcohol consumption patterns throughout the European Union and discussed potential actions for diminishing alcohol-related harm, particularly among European youth. Then, the guest speaker at the conference dinner was Matt Ridley, journalist, author of several books including Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, and chairman of the International Centre for Life, a science and education project. The subject of Mr. Ridley’s talk was “The Human Genome,” specifically what it can tell us about our species and how mapping the genome holds potential for treating a variety of diseases and disorders. Ultimately, both Mr. Ridley’s and Commissioner Byrne’s contributions to the conference ended on a relatively hopeful note. As Commissioner Byrne commented, “events such as this conference are of great importance. They show that there is increasing awareness on alcohol-related problems and that there is a need to gain more knowledge and to share experiences, to increase the understanding of the problems and of the need to tackle them.”