The GNC at Sahlgrenska Academy, in collaboration with the Neurodiversity Centre in South Africa, recently organized the conference "ESSENCE CONFERENCE 2023", which took place on April 4 and 5. During two packed days, some thirty prominent Swedish and international researchers presented their latest research results to delegates from all corners of the world.
The conference was a hybrid event, giving delegates who could not travel to beautiful Cape Town the opportunity to listen to the conference remotely.
The very well-attended conference disseminated up to the minute knowledge in the field, helped forge important new contacts and collaborations, strengthen current relationships and raise awareness of all forms of ESSENCE in South Africa, Scandinavia and worldwide.
Professor Christopher Gillberg opened the conference with a talk about the ESSENCE acronym, titled “Essence of the Essence”. ESSENCE (Early Symptomatic Syndromes Eliciting Neurodevelopmental Clinical Examinations) is an umbrella term coined by Gillberg in 2010 and refers to the entire group of neurodevelopmental/neuropsychiatric disorders where patients present with handicapping symptoms during early childhood (such as ADHD with or without defiant behaviour/Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), autism/Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), intellectual disability/Intellectual Development Disorder (IDD), language disorder/Speech and Language Impairment (SLI), Tourette’s syndrome, early onset bipolar disorder, behavioural phenotype syndrome, and a variety of neurological and epileptic disorders). The central advantage of the ESSENCE concept is that, compared to the strict divisions into clearly delineated diagnoses that form the basis for how we currently organise health care and supportive structures, ESSENCE is better at reflecting the reality of different kinds of symptomatology and symptom profiles. This is because ESSENCE captures the fact that overlapping diagnoses and comorbidity tends to be the rule rather than the exception among people with a neuropsychiatric diagnosis. Problems very rarely appear in isolation. If someone has difficulties with social interaction and regulating emotions, there is a considerable risk that they also have motor difficulties, language difficulties and executive difficulties of different kinds.
The feedback from the conference was overwhelmingly positive with many delegates asking when the next ESSENCE conference will be, and our answer to this is watch this space!
