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European Academy of Childhood Disability at Göteborg.

My colleagues in Sweden – both those who actually live in Göteborg and those who are associated with running the EACD meeting this October in Göteborg – proved unaccountably coy when it came to the request for a guest editorial for this number on the occasion of that meeting. I find myself, therefore, doubling in my present role as Chairman of the European Academy of Childhood Disability with my editorship of Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. Göteborg was founded by the great, if somewhat bloodthirsty, Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in 1619. It developed as a great seaport and today is the largest port in Scandinavia. What has this maritime connection to do with the enormous extent of work that has been carried out in Göteborg on neurodisability? A well organised administrative health service means that the possibility of doing epidemiological research is assisted, but its exploitation reflects the remarkable group of clinical scientists who have been attracted and worked in the area. One starts with the work of the paediatric neurologists led by Bengt Hagberg. Bengt, with his wife Gudrun, have been remarkable first and foremost in the field of cerebral palsy (CP). The latest paper from their study now covers children born in the birth years 1954–1994.1 It is remarkable that although CP – as Bengt himself has written – is not a disease but a ‘socio-medical symptom complex’, as a diagnostic category it has stood up over the years and the rate, although fluctuating in a small way, still comes in at somewhere between 2 and 2.5 per thousand: almost identical with that of the first cohort reported on the births between ‘54 and ‘58. The neuropaediatricians in Göteborg have not only been concerned with CP; most famously, Hagberg rediscovered the syndrome that Andreas Rett had originally described. There have been many colleagues also involved in these studies and almost at random one can note studies of the neuromuscular disorders, progressive encephalopathies, and infantile hydrocephalus. The solid epidemiological basis, together with the meticulous clinical description is perhaps the hallmark of all these studies. The extent of such work from one city would satisfy most patriots as evidence of the vigour of the intellectual activity in the biological sciences. But in addition one has to draw attention to the formidable amount of work which has been presented in the field of neuropsychiatry by Christopher Gillberg and his colleagues. Gillberg’s principal interests were firstly children with autistic spectrum disorders and secondly those with attentional, motor, and perceptual disorders. As its title implies, The Biology of the Autistic Syndromes2 written with Mary Coleman and now in its third edition, the emphasis is on the biology of these disorders. Gillberg, like Hagberg, provides us with long term population based epidemiological data. The Göteborg group has performed repeated population E diorial