Professor Valery Feigin – a world-leading scientist in stroke prevention research, came to Vietnam to attend the VinFuture Foundation’s Science and Technology Week 2024.
Professor Valery Feigin is among the most cited scientists in the world, present in Hanoi on the afternoon of December 3. Image: Viet Hung
On the afternoon of December 3, Professor Valery Feigin, 70 years old, arrived in Hanoi as a speaker at the discussion session “Science for Life” taking place on December 5. He is director of the National Institute of Stroke and Applied Neuroscience (NISAN) at Auckland University of Technology, the only research institute specializing in the epidemiology and prevention of neurological disorders in New Zealand. He is the pioneer behind international developments in the fields of stroke and epidemiology.
Professor Valery Feigin is the author of one of the world’s largest studies on stroke, heart disease, diabetes and memory loss through the “Stroke Riskometer” application. The application, developed since 2014, allows users to assess individual stroke risk on smartphones or tablets, and evaluate lifestyle factors to prevent stroke and heart disease. vascularity and memory loss. When viewed in aggregate, the data can provide unprecedented insights into some of the world’s most common infectious diseases.
Coming to Vietnam this time, Professor Valery Feigin said he would share the initiative that he and his research team have carried out over the past 10 years on using health data systems to predict the risk of stroke as well as the risks of stroke. Latest evidence of its effectiveness.
Professor Feigin began his career as a neuroscientist but shifted his focus to research after a stroke took his father’s life. “My father’s death from a stroke was a big shock to me and my family. He was a professor at Novosibirsk Medical School in Russia, a diligent and talented teacher at the peak of his career. He was very healthy. healthy and had only a few cardiovascular risk factors. When my father had a stroke, I asked myself ‘Why?’. It was his death that inspired me to research strokes and how to prevent them.” Feigin shared.
Lev, Professor Feigin’s father, appears to be at little apparent risk. “He is relatively young, 50 years old, generally healthy, only slightly overweight. He smokes and the most important risk factor is high blood pressure.” Back then, about half a century ago, the world did not have a solution to prevent strokes, even though this was a disease that caused many deaths.
Professor Feigin helped change that and won many prestigious awards for stroke research stemming from his father’s death. For more than four decades, the research of Professor Feigin and his colleagues helped identify stroke as the second largest cause of death and disability in the world. Research results also demonstrate that basic prevention measures are not effective enough because they often target people at high risk of cardiovascular disease. “But the problem is that the majority of strokes and heart attacks occur in people at low to moderate risk. 80% of people with strokes are not at high risk of cardiovascular disease,” Professor Feigin said.
Another big misconception is that stroke is not just a disease of the elderly, data shows that more and more people younger than 65 years of age are having strokes. Because this is a result of lifestyle factors, Professor Feigin believes that we can control the risk from awareness. “Before we have a higher risk of stroke later in life, we have the ability to lower our risk. That’s why young people need to know their stroke risks and how they can reduce them through dietary adjustments and lifestyle”, Professor Feigin emphasized.
Professor Valery Feigin is among the most cited scientists in the world. Image: Royal Society
The free mobile app Stroke Riskometer that Professor Feigin’s team developed provides the perfect interface to convey health information about stroke, risk factors and how to control them. According to Professor Feigin, 4 billion people in the world live on an income of 5.5 USD/day. They lack access to health care, so the Stroke Riskometer can be a reliable source of information about stroke and its associated risks.
Born and raised in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, near the border between Russia and Kazakhstan and Mongolia, Professor Feigin chose to study medicine and follow in the footsteps of his father, a professor at the city’s medical school. Always passionate about learning about the brain, he briefly trained as a psychiatrist before deciding to switch to neuroscience. After graduating from Novosibirsk Medical School, Russia, Professor Feigin moved from Moscow to the Mayo Clinic in the US and Erasmus University in the Netherlands for advanced training in neurology and clinical epidemiological research.
After finishing his internship in 1985, Professor Feigin took a research position at the SB RAMS Institute of Internal Medicine in Novosibirsk and became head of the Department of Cerebrovascular Diseases. But his research was largely unknown until 1989, when he was invited to chair and speak at the International Stroke Association conference in Kyoto, Japan. “They only invited two people from the Soviet Union. For some reason, they chose me and a professor from Latvia. But I was the only one from Russia,” Professor Feigin laughed as he recounted.
During his career, Professor Feigin authored or co-authored more than 850 scholarly publications (including more than 440 journal articles, including 109 in The Lancet), 12 manuscripts, 26 books, 4 patents. Professor Feigin’s scholarship in the fields of neurology and epidemiology is recognized around the world. According to Web of Science, Valery Feigin was among the 1% most cited scientists in the world in all scientific fields in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022. From 2021 to 2022 alone, the percentage His quotes are every 15 minutes and growing.