ESO Committee Corner: International Liaison Committee (ILC)

The European Stroke Organization (ESO) International Liaison Committee (ILC) has a key role in fulfilling the central mission of ESO, being in charge of the ESO endorsement of scientific activities.

The revised guidelines on endorsement were introduced in 2015 and appear to be working well, as a significant reduction in the number of applications that required clarification was noticed during the years 2017-2020. Requests for recurrent annual meetings or meetings that have received previous endorsement are directly endorsed by the chair without further discussion by the Committee (fast track process). The rest of applications are referred to the Committee. In all cases throughout these years the decision for endorsement has been unanimous within members of the Committee both for requests that were accepted and for those that were declined endorsement. Requests are declined after extensive discussion with all members of the Committee due to incomplete program presentation and limited scientific focus on cerebrovascular diseases.

A significant number of requests for endorsement has been received over the years 2017-2020: 17 requests for endorsement in 2017-2018, 32 requests in 2018-19 and 24 requests in 2019-2020. The median time from request submission to final decision during the years 2017-2020 was 4 days.

We also expanded the activities of the ESO ILC as we reached a successful collaboration agreement with the Chinese Stroke Association (CSA) following a joint CSA-ESO session at the ESO Conference (ESOC) 2017. We also participated with the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Council on the Stroke Heart & Brain Workshop 2018 (19-20 January 2018, Charles University, Prague), a meeting that resulted in a position paper from the Study Group on Heart and Brain Interaction of the Heart Failure Association.  Finally, we reached a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the European Society for Swallowing Disorders (ESSD) and a MoU with the European Society of Neurosonology and Cerebral Hemodynamics (ESNCH).

The ILC met in person at ESOC 2017 in Prague, ESOC 2018 in Gothenburg and ESOC 2019 in Milan. The ILC met online in June 2020.

From July 1, 2020 Dr. Maurizio Paciaroni will be the new chair of ILC, while Dr. Georgios Tsivgoulis has finished his term in ILC and he will be substituted by Dr. Aristeidis Katsanos.