Message from Prof. Giuseppe Mancia,
Chairperson of the 15th European Meeting on Hypertension, held June 17-21, 2005 in Milan, Italy

We’re all very pleased at the success of this meeting. There was a huge attendance of about 6500 participants. Each European country was represented, but also a very high quality representation from all other countries from all over the world.

The program has been excellent from the quality point of view, with many presentations of original research, either oral presentations or as posters, out of a record number of abstracts received (1600). Many State-of-the-Art Lectures were given by well-known experts from all around the world, and there were topical workshops and breakfast workshops on hot selected issues.

Even an important teaching part of the meeting was included, with teaching seminars, how-to sessions, and discussions on clinical topics. What I find amazing is that the attendance to these events was incredibly large, even the big auditorium used for the Teaching Sessions could not accommodate all the attendees, and the auditorium holds more than 2000 people. So, there is every reason to be pleased.

There were a lot of satellite events; 14 of them were sponsored by drug companies on specific items and drugs, but 8 of them were investigator-generated on highly specific scientific issues. These were held before and after the meeting in Milan and in other Italian cities, and two were outside of Italy, held in Greece and Cracow. So this meeting is becoming a meeting with a network, which tends to involve a wider European territory.