Klaus Lauer

Klaus Joachim Lauer was born in 1950 and studied medicine in Frankfurt (Germany) from 1968 to 1975. He became a resident in the Department of Neurology of Klinikum Darmstadt, the Academic Teaching Hospital of Frankfurt University (Akademisches Lehrkrankenhaus der Universitäten Frankfurt/Main und Heidelberg-Mannheim, a major healthcare institution in South Hesse. Besides clinical work, Lauer devoted most of his research to epidemiology, with a special focus on MS etiology.

Early on, he published a series of five articles[1][2][3][4][5] on multiple sclerosis in the land of Hesse with Wolfgang Firnhaber, who had already been studying MS epidemiology in Göttingen and Darmstadt,[6] with support from the Hertie Foundation, the German Research Foundation and the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft. His lasting collaboration with Prof. Firnhaber, a longtime expert in MS prognostication[7][8][9] and geomedical aspects of MS,[10] provided K. Lauer with a solid background in geomedical investigation.[11][12]

In the mid 80's, Lauer launched a series of specialized reports in Scandinavia, starting with a study of multiple sclerosis in Western Norway published in Neurology.[13] He has been following Norvegian MS ever since [14][15] and has also coauthored epidemiological studies in Sweden with Anne-Marie Landtblom and Inger Boström.[16]

Like John Kurtzke,[17] Klaus J. Lauer has dedicated a large part of his work to the study of MS in the Faroe Islands,[18] starting with a 1986 article in the Journal of Neurology entitled "Some comments on the occurrence of multiple sclerosis in the Faroe Islands",[19] followed in 1988 by "Multiple sclerosis in relation to industrial and commercial activities in the Faroe Islands"[20] in the journal Neuroepidemiology, followed one year later by "Dietary changes in temporal relation to multiple sclerosis in the Faroe Islands: an evaluation of literary sources"[21] in the same journal.

Remains of the WW2 British barracks at Vágar Airport on the Faroe Islands

2005 Faroese stamp: British soldiers and children in the Faroe Islands

MS is generally considered a multifactorial disease,[22] in which genetic predispositions and environmental triggers combine to launch an autoimmune process. As an international expert on the environmental dimension of MS,[23] Lauer compiled a review in Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics.[24]

Since 1992, Lauer has published a large number of epidemiological studies covering most west European countries,[25][26][27][28][29] Russia,[30] the USA,[31][32] Canada, some countries in Asia and the Middle-East,[33] with a special focus on dietary aspects of etiology.[34][35][36][37] Most recently, Klaus Lauer has focused again on MS in the Faroes [38][39] and has been involved as an expert in the steering committee of the EnviMS study, a major multi-countries study investigating the impact of environmental exposures on MS.[40][41][42] Lauer is also one of the authors of a reference study of the cost of MS in Europe[43] and of several publications dealing with technical and methodological considerations in neuroepidemiology applied to multiple sclerosis.[44][45]

• Klinikum Darmstadt official page