Welcome to the nearly 1,000 vascular specialists and industry professionals who have travelled from more than 40 countries from around the world to participate in the Charing Cross Silver Jubilee Symposium. Welcome also to the over 8,000 readers of Vascular News across Europe.
This is a landmark occasion for the symposium that I started 25 years ago which has grown to become the largest and longest running vascular symposium in Europe. More than ever the meeting has become a forum for the leading experts from three main disciplines involved in vascular disease management to weigh up the latest evidence for vascular and endovascular reconstruction. Vascular surgeons, interventional radiologists and interventional cardiologists will strive to reach a consensus over the course of this four-day meeting. In its Jubilee year, the Charing Cross Symposium kicks off with the EAVST Vascular and Endovascular Training Day on Saturday (12 April) in the Decade Suite of the Millennium Gloucester Hotel. The Global Endovascular Forum takes place on Sunday (13 April) and provides an additional day of the highest quality CME, covering new technologies, new techniques and new horizons.
Finally the 25th Charing Cross meeting is the launch pad for a new portal for vascular professionals where you can access the latest news featured in Vascular News, Interventional News and Cardiovascular News as well as much of the educational content presented at Charing Cross meetings in recent years. Visit
www.CXvascular.com
In this special issue of Vascular News, we look at the history of the meeting which has consistently attracted the pioneers from around the world: Michael DeBakey, one of the founding fathers of vascular surgery, Denton Cooley, Felix Eascott and Frank Cockett, as well as endovascular pioneers such as Julio Palmaz, Tom Fogarty, Klaus Mathias and Juan Parodi. The meeting has attracted royal patronage, Princess Anne was the guest of honour in 1982, and was the springboard for the ESVS with its inaugural meeting being held at the Charing Cross meeting in 1987.
Many people ask me what makes the Charing Cross so special.
The success of the Charing Cross International Symposium is based on clear, educational objectives. It is a master class where the audience is almost as knowledgeable as the distinguished world-class faculty. Very few are trainees. In the setting of the UK’s leading scientific establishment, Imperial College, the leading vascular specialists from around the world will debate a series of vascular and endovascular controversies that exist in vascular disease management by challenging the existing evidence in order to reach a consensus of the relative merits of vascular and endovascular reconstruction.
Roger Greenhalgh
