The three day international conference will consist of plenary lectures, oral presentations, poster sessions and an exhibition. Companies and research organizations are offered the opportunity to organize a satellite symposium.

Dear colleagues and friends,


Unprecedented times… required unprecedented measures. Due to the worldwide pandemic, we were not be able to invite you all to the Twelfth International Congress on Spondyloarthritides in 2020, but will try to make it up now in September 2021.

The Belgian COVID-19 measures and internal rules of the University of Gent, allow us to welcome only a small number of participants to Gent. We therefore were forced to restrict the live congress to the Organising and Scientific Committees, the speakers and the sponsors, without whose support the organisation of this congress would not be possible.


However, we are pleased to announce that the congress will be livestreamed on an online platform where you and many international colleagues can tune in and view the talks in real-time or at a convenient time for a month after the congress dates. Furthermore, the platform will offer ample opportunity for networking.

The congress has grown over the years to become the premier international event in the field of the Spondylarthritides. The success of the Gent congress has been underpinned by the quality of the scientific contributions including the state-of-the-art lectures given by carefully chosen guest speakers and selected abstract presenters. To facilitate the organisation of a live event, the local and scientific organizers focused on excellent speakers from continental Western Europe. We have not forgotten our far-away friends and colleagues and hope to see you back in 2022 at the next full edition.

The programme for the 2021 congress will still offer a wide range of topics including basic and clinical translational research, genetics, imaging and therapeutics.

In 2018, the ‘Gent Oration’ was introduced, aimed to honor a scientist or clinician with an established trajectory in the field which we expect with time, to become one of the main highlights of the congress. It is our great pleasure to invite Professor Maxime Dougados as the inaugural Gent orator in this second edition.

We hope to welcome you online to the Twelfth International Congress on Spondyloarthritides and remain,

Yours sincerely,

Rik Lories, President
Dirk Elewaut and Filip Van den Bosch, Local Organisers

The Royal Belgian Society for Rheumatology takes great pleasure in announcing the 25th Belgian Congress on Rheumatology, taking place at the Egg in Brussels on 29 - 30 September & 1 October 2021.
We are honoured to inform you that this year’s edition will be a co-organisation between the KBVR-SRBR and the Société française de Rhumatologie (SFR).
This year the programme will especially focus on the research by young investigators, but it will be a well-known mix of state-of-the-art invited lectures by internationally renowned speakers, selected oral presentations and Updates organised with the support of the industry.
Together with the KBVR-SRBR Board members, we hope and expect to be able to welcome you to a fully live congress in Brussels, and we also look forward to welcoming our French colleagues.

Op 1 en 2 oktober 2021 organiseren de afdelingen nierziekten van de ZNA en GZA ziekenhuisgroepen een dialysecursus met als titel Hemodialyse Update: van theorie naar praktijk.

In één dag hebt u samen met 800 huisartsen en andere zorgprofessionals uit de eerste lijn toegang tot ruim 70 geaccrediteerde sessies en meer dan 90 exposanten. Dat maakt de Huisartsenconferentie en Vakbeurs van Domus Medica tot een uniek evenement!

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

The promotion of quality management is essential. Treatment outcome assessment, research outcomes, guidelines, best papers and best practices
are not known by all practitioners.

For this reason, the European Spine Journal organizes its third Spine Sciences “Meet the Experts™” Forum focusing on revision surgery.
Experts in this field have been carefully selected and asked to provide the Journal with an article describing their techniques and experience. These articles will be published as a ‘special issue’ of the European Spine Journal.

The Spine Sciences “Meet the Experts™” Forum aims at optimizing exchanges of knowledge.

This meeting will be highly interactive. With this scope, the format has been designed and based on interactive case-based discussions with experts - rather than on lectures - with residual time left for discussion. You will have the opportunity to interact with some of the most respected world experts in the field, while bridging between state-of-the-art sciences and clinical practice.

We look forward to seeing you in Madrid!

Robert Gunzburg

Editor-in-Chief European Spine Journal

Sociolinguistics Symposium is the world’s main gathering of sociolinguists internationally. This two-yearly event provides a unique opportunity and forum to develop and exchange ideas and research findings about language and society in its manifold connections and manifestations. From its beginnings as a small meeting in the UK in 1976, the tradition of Sociolinguistic Symposia has grown into the largest sociolinguistic networking event in the world. Attracting hundreds of participants and exhibitors, the Symposium is also a stimulating space for networking.

It is with much enthusiasm that we announce Sociolinguistics Symposium 24. SS24 will be held in Ghent in July 2022. In close consultation with previous symposium organizers and our colleagues in Hong Kong, the tradition of a meeting in even years is upheld. SS24 in 2022 will mark the 20th anniversary of the first Sociolinguistics Symposium hosted on the European mainland (SS14 in Ghent in 2002). SS24 is organized by Ghent University in close collaboration with the Belgian sociolinguistic community. The dates of the conference are 13-16 July 2022.

Dear Colleagues,

The idea to have a joint meeting bringing together several spine societies at the same time and at the same place originated around the turn of the century.
The SpineWeek committee was mandated with the practical organisation of such a conference, and this led to the first SpineWeek meeting which was held in Porto, Portugal in 2004. It was well received by individual participants, the involved scientific spine societies and by the supporting MedTech industry.

Three more SpineWeeks followed: Geneva (Switzerland) in 2008, Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in 2012 and Singapore in 2016.

One of the remarkable evolutions noted from one SpineWeek to the next, was the increase of participants coming from Asia Pacific. This incited the SpineWeek committee to move east for the 2020 SpineWeek meeting. Unfortunaly we were unable to organize SpineWeek 2020 due to the Corona virus but we are very pleased to announce that SpineWeek 2020 has been moved to 1-5 May, 2023 in Melbourne.

Next to the usual participating spine societies such as the North American Spine Society (NASS) and the Brasilian Spine Society, we now welcome other societies. SpineWeek meetings have been at the origin of many a scientific collaboration bringing together clinicians and scientists from around the world and from very different scientific societies.

We look forward to a truly exciting week in Melbourne, both at a scientific and a social level.

Join us for this first Oceanian SpineWeek meeting and spread the word!

The SpineWeek Committee
Chris Colloca
Jiří Dvořák
Robert Gunzburg
Marek Szpalski