AUT stroke expert’s global contribution recognised

AUT stroke expert’s global contribution recognised

Professor Valery Feigin has tonight been recognised for his outstanding contribution to stroke and traumatic brain injury research at a special ceremony at Auckland University of Technology.

The Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC) presented Professor Feigin, Director of the National Institute for Stroke and Applied Neurosciences at Auckland University of Technology, with an established researcher award as part of its 25-year anniversary celebrations.

Colleague Dr Alice Theadom took out the HRC award for health research excellence as an emerging researcher.

Professor Feigin has been involved in 16 HRC-funded studies totalling more than $18 million since 2000. He has led four HRC-funded projects and the highly influential programme, the Auckland Regional Community Stroke study. This Auckland-based programme revealed, among other major findings, a trend towards declining stroke rates in New Zealand Europeans over the past 20 years, yet a near doubling of stroke rates in Māori and Pacific populations over the same period.

HRC Group Manager of Investment Processes, Dr Vernon Choy, was part of the panel that assessed the award nominations. He says Professor Feigin’s research stood out as having had a major impact not just in New Zealand, but on the world stage.

“Valery and his team were the first in the world to show diverging trends in stroke burden between developed and developing countries, the increased burden of stroke across the globe, and the large and increasingly hazardous effect of air pollution on stroke burden worldwide, details of which were recently published in The Lancet Neurology,” says Dr Choy.

“In addition to stroke, findings from his team’s HRC-funded Brain Injury Outcomes New Zealand in the Community study uncovered the true extent of traumatic brain injury in New Zealand, showing that the scope of the burden is actually six times greater than even the World Health Organization estimated.”
Professor Feigin’s HRC-funded projects have resulted in 200 journal article publications in such top medical journals as The Lancet, The Lancet Neurology, Stroke, the International Journal of Stroke, and the European Journal of Neurology.

“Valery’s work remains of critical importance for evidence-based health care planning for strokes and traumatic brain injuries. It has also significantly influenced our current understanding of the epidemiology and prevention of these two potentially very debilitating conditions,” says Dr Choy.

Dr Alice Theadom, a senior research fellow at Auckland University of Technology and deputy director of the National Institute for Stroke and Applied Neurosciences, received the HRC outstanding emerging researcher award for her studies on traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) in New Zealand.

Dr Choy says that Dr Theadom’s HRC-funded studies have led to the discovery that mild TBIs, which include concussions, occur far more frequently than previously thought.

“When Alice first started her research, mild TBIs were often trivialised, with people generally expected to recover within days or weeks of their injury. However, her research has shown that half of adults and nearly a third of children who have suffered a mild TBI experience ongoing symptoms for at least one year after the initial injury – and even up to four years in some cases. This indicates that the label ‘mild TBI’ is misleading,” says Dr Choy.

The results of Dr Theadom’s research are now being used as part of multi-million dollar international collaborations, which will develop guidelines for identifying and managing TBIs worldwide.

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