The VL Nordic Congress of Ophthalmology 2024

The VL Nordic Congress of Ophthalmology (NOK) will be held on 5–8 August 2024, in Kuopio, Finland (www.nok2024.fi). The NOK is a joint program of the Danish, Finnish, Iceland's, Norwegian and Swedish Ophthalmology Societies, represented by the NOK Committee. The NOK concept was first proposed by the Finnish ophthalmologist Gustaf A. Nordman (Ehinger and Grzybowski 2011). He was the first President of the Finnish Ophthalmological Society in 1911 (Kivelä, 2012). Officially, NOK was initiated by Swedish ophthalmologist and Nobel laureate Allvar Gullstrand at the 9th International Ophthalmological Congress in Utrecht in 1899. The first NOK meeting was organized by Allvar Gullstrand and held 1 year later in Stockholm. Allvar Gullstrand is the only ophthalmologist who has won a Nobel Prize (Ehinger & Grzybowski, 2011). The second NOK meeting was held in Copenhagen in 1903, and the third meeting was planned in Kristiania in 1906. In the meantime, Norway became a free country, and the meeting was postponed until 1907 (Ehinger & Grzybowski, 2011; Seregard, 2014). Currently, the NOK is held biennially instead of the original 3-year interval. An assortment of world crisis has forced NOK postponements (Seregard, 2014). The longest rest period (9 years) took place during World War II, and the COVID-19 pandemic postponed NOK from 2020 to 2022 in Reykjavik.

The Acta Ophthalmologica Award 2024 will be given to Professor Jesper Hjortdal (Denmark) for his achievements in cornea research. The KKK Lundsgaard Silver Medal will be given for the best Acta Ophthalmologica publication during the last 2 years between NOK congresses. This time, the best publication prize during the 2022–2024 follow-up period goes to Sirks MJ, van Dijk EHC, Rosenberg N, Hollak CEM, Aslanis S, Cheung CMG, Chowers I, Eandi CM, Freund KB, Holz FG, Kaiser PK, Lotery AJ, Ohno-Matsui K, Querques G, Subhi Y, Tadayoni R, Wykoff CC, Zur D, Diederen RMH, Boon CJF, Schlingemann RO in Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, Israel, Switzerland, United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark and France (Sirks et al., 2022). The authors discussed the clinical impact of the worldwide shortage of verteporfin.

The scientific program of NOK 2024 consists of 36 sessions, of which 2 are keynotes, 25 symposia, 1 course, 6 industry-organized lunch symposiums, Acta Ophthalmologica Gold and Silver Medal donation ceremony, posters and free paper short talks. Keynote talks will be by Professors Jennifer Thorne from the Wilmer Eye Institute for uveitis and Prof. Rikhard Spaide at Vitreous, Retina, Macula Consultants of New York, who updates current retina diseases. Two symposia have been organized together with Baltic colleagues.

Acta Ophthalmologica and the European Association for Vision and Eye Research (EVER) signed a collaboration agreement in 2006 (Kaarniranta and Stefánsson 2021). In Kuopio NOK EVER joint session will be organized by the EVER president 2024, Andrzej Grzubowski, and Glaucoma section chairman Miriam Kolko. The session will focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The European Society of Ophthalmology (SOE) will arrange two sessions with young ophthalmologists on myopia and emergency situations in eye care. Uveitis is the topic of the young ophthalmologist's training course. Avanzanite, Bausch & Lomb, Bayer, Roche, Santen and Thea provide lunch symposiums in three parallel sessions over 2 days. The whole program updates current clinical challenges, such as traffic medicine, registry data, ocular oncology, glaucoma, myopia, genetic diseases, degenerative and metabolic problems, auto-immune eye diseases, surgery, neuro-ophthalmology, imaging technology and AI, economic aspects and finally looks future therapies.

We wish you a successful NOK2024 and hope for continued fruitful collaboration with You, NOK and EVER members and industry partners.

Looking forward to see you in Kuopio.

Sincerely,