Autonomic Disorders Specialty Group (ADSG)

Chair: Paula Sandroni

email: pietro.cortelli@unibo.it

ADSG Board Members

• Pietro Cortelli (Bologna, Italy)
• Roy Freeman (Boston, MA, USA)
• Alla B. Guekht (Moscow, Russia)
• Dafin F. Muresanu (Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
• Peter Novak (Boston, MA, USA)
• Stefan M. Pulst (Salt Lake City, UT, USA)
• Jessica Robinson-Papp (New York, NY, USA)
• Wolfgang Singer (Rochester, MN, USA)
• Luciano Sposato (London, Ontario, Canada)
• Walter Struhal (Tulln, Austria) 

About

The Autonomic Disorder Subspecialty Group strives to advance the awareness, understanding, and treatment of autonomic nervous system (ANS) disorders. The ANS modulates all organs and fine-tunes their function in a state and sleep-wake-cycle dependent manner via a complex feedback and feed-forward system that is intertwined with all organs and instantaneously adjusts organ function and physiological responses to constantly changing physical, mental, or psychological challenges. Yet, medical school education and specialist training in neurology or other disciplines dedicate rather little time and attention to this complex and central area of medicine.

However, almost all neurological and other diseases are associated with ANS dysfunction. Primary and secondary autonomic diseases often significantly shorten the patients' life expectancy and significantly compromise quality of life. We could not even stand up without proper ANS function. Still, too little is known about the testing procedures needed to diagnose and differentiate autonomic cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, sudomotor, bladder, or sexual dysfunction, to mention only a few aspects of ANS function and dysfunction. The most frequent central nervous system disease among young adults, multiple sclerosis, as well as stroke that afflicts one person every 8 seconds, epilepsy that affects approximately 50 million people, traumatic head injuries that occur in up to 30 million persons every year, diabetes mellitus with a current prevalence of approximately 500 million people, the sequelae of the Covid-19 pandemic, and legions of other common and rare diseases are all associated with ANS dysfunction. The resulting autonomic dysregulation may compromise many aspects of the patients' daily life, be it the ability to stand and walk, to normally empty the bladder or bowels, control body temperature, experience regular sexual function, or to adjust the eyes to different levels of brightness. Thus, there is a dire need of teaching neurologists and other physicians how to assess autonomic dysfunction, and to advance autonomic research.

The ADSG strives to promote knowledge about autonomic diseases, to teach testing procedures that can be used by any general neurologist and physician as well as procedures that require more sophisticated methods in order to identify autonomic disorders at early stages of disease, to help differentiate diseases such as Multisystem Atrophy and Parkinson disease, to recognize rare as well as common ANS disorders at early stages, and to advance the therapeutic arsenal of neurologists.

The ADSG is committed to promoting research in diseases involving autonomic dysfunction and seeks the clinical and academic exchange and interaction with the other Subspecialty Groups of WFN as well as other societies.

Many ADSG members are actively involved in other autonomic societies, and the ADSG intends to foster the cooperation with autonomic societies and groups, such as the American Autonomic Society (AAS) , the European Federation of Autonomic Societies (EFAS) as well as the autonomic sections within the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) and the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), in order to increase the understanding of and interest in ANS disorders on a global level to the benefit of our patients.