President's Message
Todd J. Albert, MD
SRS President 2017-2018
The start of 2018 has been a busy time for the SRS, ending a strong 2017 with educational, research, and advocacy activities. We had an excellent course chair training that was held in New York at Hospital for Special Surgery in December led by our educational consultant, Joe Green, as well as past president and Education Task Force chair, Ken Cheung. There was tremendous involvement from both international and regional representatives who are course chairs for the upcoming year. Ken will highlight this in his column.
I would like to make the entire membership aware of an important initiative that the SRS is supporting along with many of our industry partners. The Adult Symptomatic Lumbar Scoliosis II is an extension of the National Institute of Health (NIH) funded study led by Keith Bridwell and others to compare operative to non-operative treatment for adult symptomatic lumbar scoliosis. This important study is continuing to gain follow up in the longer term from originally enrolled patients. The SRS has taken this on in conjunction with the ISSG, who will be acting as the contract research organization (CRO), and important industry supporters to continue the study to gain insight and results appropriate for our patients to gain answers in this important and increasingly prevalent disease state.
We want to especially acknowledge our industry core supporters, Globus Medical, K2M, Medtronic, NuVasive, and Zimmer Biomet who have generously stepped up to help continue to fund this study. It will be the highest level randomized prospective study with excellent data collection to be able to perform cost utility and cost effectiveness analysis and to be able to answer questions for our membership, our patients and the payers as to the efficacy of intervention for adult symptomatic lumbar scoliosis. We appreciate the help of our partners and our members who have spent many hours working on the study and will continue to work hard in this partnership to gain the answers we need.
Abstract submissions have closed, and many of our members were busy at work completing their submissions. We had an impressive year, with 1,617 submissions for IMAST and the Annual Meeting. Our program committees for Annual Meeting and IMAST have just gotten together on March 6 to go through the grading and to start to create an excellent program for both IMAST in Los Angeles, CA, USA and our Annual Meeting in Bologna, Italy.
The IMAST meeting in Los Angeles is expected to be superb, celebrating its 25th Anniversary with significant special programming highlighting this important event. I encourage you to attend to enjoy this excellent city and the outstanding program being put together by Ron Lehman, Henry Halm, and their committee members. We are looking forward not only to the program but involvement of the past IMAST chairs as well as a historical display in the exhibit hall.
I hope all of you had a joyful holiday season, and 2018 is off to an excellent start. I look forward to seeing you at our upcoming meetings.