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Meet Bas Bloem, Professor of Movement Disorder Neurology and Director of the Centre of Expertise for Parkinson and Movement Disorders, and working at Radboudumc since 2000. He is involved in the research program Parkinson’s Disease & Other Movement Disorders.
If you weren't a scientist, what do you think you would be doing today?
In that case, I would be a sports commentator. That requires a bit of explanation. I was brought up in a family that literally breathed exercise and sports. My father was my own sports teacher in high school. In my early years between the ages of 15 and 21, I had a career as a semi-professional volleyball player. I used to play for the Dutch national youth team (the under-18, it is called Jong Oranje in Dutch. And I also played in the Dutch premier league (Eredivisie) for several years.
So sports have become a large part of my life, and I still exercise very regularly , which I think is part of why I am an effective and successful clinician and scientist. In my work as a researcher, I combine my passion for sports and neurology by doing large studies to demonstrate the merits and cost-effectiveness of exercise for people with Parkinson's disease. And what is really wonderful is that my two sons have both inherited the passion for sports, which they both combine with their university studies.
My youngest son Douwe is a complete athlete who almost literally lives in the Radboud University gym, and who is really good at virtually any sport he tries. When he was playing football at Orion, I was doing the live Instagram account with feeds about the game and with interviews with the coach and players afterwards. I really loved doing that. My oldest son Jochem has become a professional volleyball player at Draisma Dynamo in Apeldoorn which is just wonderful to see.
During the home games, I do the live comments for web-based television together with another commentator. There are few things in life that I enjoy more. I am also the "flying reporter" for Tijd voor Volleybal during important international games, where I run around with a reporter's badge and microphone, and do live interviews on the floor with players and coaches. If I would not have been a scientist, I would have made this my professional job.
What's the most unusual or surprising hobby or interest you have that most people here might not know about?
In my spare time, I work on model trains in the cellar of my house. For the interested fellow hobbyists: I work with HO models of Märklin with a specific focus on German railroads in the 1970s and 1980s of the previous century. I used to have such a model train as a young child, and I decided to pick up this hobby several years ago. I've built an insanely ambitious large module in my cellar which I know will never ever be completed. But it is so extremely gratifying to be working on something completely different.
Even the smell in my cellar is different, which automatically means that I am completely in a different world far away from my regular work at the Radboud University Medical Centre. People might think that it is a silly idea of an adult playing with model trains, and they have fully incorrect images of me sitting there with a whistle and a conductor's cap. But in reality, I am a carpenter, I'm an architect, I'm an electrician, and most importantly, I am a computer scientist because these modern model trains are completely driven by computers.
It is really gratifying and also stimulating to be submerged in a completely different world where I constantly need to learn new things. I am terribly clumsy myself, which means that it is a very challenging enterprise. Fortunately, I have the support of an increasing number of friends with whom I spend time in weekends working on the trains.
If you could solve one major scientific mystery in your lifetime, what would it be and why?
It would obviously be to identify the cause (or probably better said, the causes) of Parkinson's disease. In more recent work, I am increasingly focused on the environmental contribution to Parkinson's disease, which I think is substantial. Pesticides, heavy metals, solvents, air pollution, and repeated head trauma are all contributing to causing this devastating disease, all in a complex interplay with an underlying genetic predisposition. At the same time, there are healthy lifestyle behaviours that could help to prevent Parkinson's disease, including exercise and healthy diets.
This means that Parkinson's disease, which is the world's fastest growing neurodegenerative condition, is at least to an extent preventable. But this requires a careful, meticulous understanding of the exact contributions of all of these factors and their complex interaction. I literally hope that one day I will receive a letter by the board of the Radboud University Medical Centre telling me that I have been sacked because Parkinson's disease no longer exists on the planet.
How has your work intersected with other fields, and what surprising connections have you found?
Together with Marten Munneke, we have founded the nationwide ParkinsonNet, which is a professional network of healthcare professionals who have received deep training in supporting people with Parkinson's disease and in working in a patient-centred and collaborative way. Building this network meant that we had to work together with healthcare professionals from a wide range of different medical disciplines. We have currently trained 20 different disciplines as part of our network, and it is still growing.
Importantly, our own research has shown that the Parkinson's approach leads to better care, fewer disease complications, and substantially lower healthcare costs for society. This has opened the door to an incredibly wide range of collaborations outside my immediate field of expertise. Within the Netherlands, we have developed very interesting and encouraging collaborations with government bodies and healthcare insurers. The ParkinsonNet infrastructure is also very interesting for companies building, for example, technological solutions, and we have many ongoing public-private partnerships.
The outstanding performance of the ParkinsonNet concept also led to an international extension, so that our network approach has now been implemented in among others Norway, Luxembourg, and the United States. We are currently doing new implementation programmes in Poland, France, Italy, and Australia.
Is there a book, movie, or piece of art that has significantly influenced your scientific thinking or career path?
It is not just one piece of art, but it is the world of art in general. My latest career development has been to study the merits of both receptive arts (for example, visiting a museum) and creative arts (producing works of art yourself) to generate health benefits for people with Parkinson's disease. This was all inspired by patients that I saw in my clinic and who received consolation by producing art.
They discovered that being an artist identified them as being a person rather than as being a patient. It had become their way of expressing themselves. We are now doing very interesting research studies to study art as if it were a drug by doing carefully controlled clinical trials to study the cost-effectiveness, dose, and adverse effects of art. This has also resulted in a wide range of really interesting new collaborations with, among others, museums such as the Valkhof Museum here in Nijmegen and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Studying art has thus become an intrinsic part of my overall ambition to develop a holistic approach to optimally support people with Parkinson's disease and their families.
Can you share a 'eureka' moment from your research that still excites you when you think about it?
This was undoubtedly the moment when I encountered a person with Parkinson's disease who had severe freezing of gait, meaning that his feet were severely and literally glued to the floor which considerably hampered his ability to walk. But during the medical interview, this gentleman told me that he was still able to effortlessly ride a bicycle. We stepped outside, and lo and behold! He drove off on the bicycle without any problems. I videotaped that performance, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, after which it became front-page news on the New York Times and was then broadcast on literally almost every television and radio station in the world.
It opened my eyes that people with Parkinson's disease, despite facing severe difficulties in their automatic motor behaviour, can still generate adequate movements by engaging alternative brain circuitries. This has led to a long series of research studies on studying how people can generate such alternative movements - and by studying how this works in the brain. In many ways, patients are the muse in our work here because they keep telling us what strategies they have identified themselves in order to move better. And the beautiful thing is that we can now transfer that knowledge back to other patients in the world via our national and international Parkinson's Net networks. So it all opened the door to new treatment strategies while at the same time it was a fundamental insight into how the brain generates movement.
