World Neurology Day is celebrated on July 22nd. The initiative includes a series of events also in Italy, with the aim of increasing awareness of the impact of neurological diseases and the increasingly strategic role of neurology in the protection of public health.
The reason is simple. The area covered by this discipline is very broad: it ranges from the extreme rapidity required for a stroke to the most complex and difficult to manage chronic conditions, such as Alzheimer’s. All of this, with one certainty. Neurological diseases certainly weigh on the individual, his family, healthcare and welfare.
The burden of neurological pathologies
According to what the data show Global Burden of Disease Study of the World Health Organization, pathological conditions of the nervous system affect 3.4 billion people and constitute the leading global cause of ill health and disability.
Even in Italy the impact is significant: over a million people live with a form of dementia, around 300,000 with Parkinson’s disease, 144,000 with multiple sclerosis. Added to these numbers is cerebral stroke, one of the main causes of death and disability: around 90,000 new cases are recorded in our country every year.
All this leads to a significant health, social and economic impact: a cost of over 20 billion euros per year is estimated, including healthcare spending, assistance and loss of productivity, with increasingly significant consequences for families, caregivers and the sustainability of the National Health Service.
How difficult it is to govern the situation
The lengthening of life expectancy, the chronicity of many neurological conditions and the complexity of diagnosis and treatment pathways make these pathologies one of the main contemporary health challenges, with a growing impact on the quality of life of people, on families and on the sustainability of health systems.
Neurology, in fact, is today called upon to oversee an increasingly broader field: from acute time-dependent pathologies to neurodegenerative diseases, from chronic conditions to rare diseases. Precisely the latter represent an area of particular importance, if we consider that 40% of rare diseases are neurological in nature and require specific and highly qualified skills.
“Neurology is a vast, complex discipline. It not only deals with emergencies and urgency, therefore with time-dependent pathologies such as stroke, but also with extremely complex chronic pathologies: multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s disease, headaches. These are diseases that last for decades and often the therapeutic choices must be gradually updated according to the needs of the patients. They require highly specialized skills not only for identification and diagnosis, but also for treatment over time”
reports Mario Zappia, president of the Italian Society of Neurology (SIN).
Brain health at the core
While digital transformation is profoundly changing the way of making diagnoses, monitoring patients and organizing care, according to SIN experts, the neurologist will also have to be able to play a more incisive role in institutional relations and in the decision-making processes that define the organization of services, the need for specialists and healthcare planning in the territories.
Alongside diagnosis, treatment and management, prevention represents one of the most innovative chapters of contemporary neurology. The most recent scientific evidence indicates that a significant portion of neurological risk is modifiable: prevention is therefore possible and must become an integral part of public health strategies, through early interventions, social and educational policies, promotion of healthy lifestyles and reduction of inequalities.
“Prevention is something new in the neurological field. In neurology it has often been little considered, probably because many diseases have been considered to have an inevitable course. But today we know, for example, that in the field of dementia we have 45% of modifiable risk factors”
observes Mario Zappia.
Hence the centrality of Brain Health, which means Brain health means taking care of this very important organ regardless of the presence of a neurological disease.
