In Memoriam Eivind Berge,MD,PhD,1964–2020

Abstract

Professor Eivind Berge, MD, PhD died from cancer on 6 February 2020. He was a highly respected stroke expert, clinical trialist and clinician scientist who made substantial contributions to evidence-based stroke medicine and the work of the European Stroke Organisation.

Professor Eivind Berge, MD, PhD died from cancer on 6 February 2020. He was a highly respected stroke expert, clinical trialist and clinician scientist who made substantial contributions to evidence-based stroke medicine and the work of the European Stroke Organisation. He was noted for his warm, friendly manner, wisdom and great common sense and he was a very good friend and a wonderful colleague to many stroke clinicians around the world. In the cardiology department at Oslo University Hospital, these characteristics made him much loved by his patients. That gentle exterior concealed a great strength of purpose, integrity and a profound understanding of what really matters in medicine – characteristics which also made him the kind of person you would want to have as Chair of a key committee, or to join your collaborative group or be your research supervisor or mentor.

Eivind was born and raised in Fredrikstad, south-east of Oslo in Norway. He graduated in Medicine from the University of Oslo in 1990 and continued his medical training as resident and fellow at various departments in the Oslo University Hospital System, obtaining his PhD in the Department of Haematology, Ullevål Hospital, in 2001. He took up a one year post-doctoral research fellowship at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Western General Hospital, University of Edinburgh, UK in 2000, which led to a lifelong collaboration with the Edinburgh Stroke Research Group and the Cochrane Stroke Review Group. He achieved his tenure and staff membership in the Department of Cardiology, Ullevål hospital, in 2008.

Eivind’s broad training in medicine and cardiology provided a wonderful grounding not only for his clinical practice but also his broad portfolio of research projects in stroke, cardiology and hypertension. His PhD project was the Heparin in Acute Embolic Stroke Trial published in 2001. That trial was published while he was working in Edinburgh, where he worked on three projects: the development of the Third International Stroke Trial (IST-3) of thrombolytic therapy for acute ischaemic stroke, a systematic review and health economic analysis of thrombolysis for stroke for the UK National Health Service Health Technology Assessment programme and on Cochrane systematic reviews of antithrombotic and thrombolytic therapy for stroke. On his return to Oslo, he set about establishing a network of sites to participate in IST-3 in Norway (2002–2012), and then also set up his own trial, the Scandinavian Candesartan Acute Stroke Trial (SCAST) (2006–2011) to assess the effects of blood pressure lowering in acute stroke. After SCAST, the next big question was whether people with ‘wake-up’ stroke (whose time of onset is unknown) might benefit from thrombolysis with intravenous tenecteplase. In collaboration with colleagues at the University of North Norway, Eivind developed the Tenecteplase in Wake-up Ischaemic Stroke Trial which started in June 2017; the first patient in the trial was included in Norway in July 2017, but sadly, Eivind’s untimely death meant he was unable to see the trial to its conclusion. He also initiated and organised the Study of Antithrombotic Treatment after Intracranial Haemorrhage which compares antithrombotic treatment versus control in 500 patients with a recent intracerebral haemorrhage (http://statich.no/). His research covered stroke from many different perspectives (long-term outcome, prognostic factors, the role of blood pressure variability, the cost of stroke) and applied a range of different research designs (systematic reviews, prospective cohort studies, randomised trials and health-economic modelling). He was member of the editorial board of several prestigious journals. In 2012, in recognition of his work, he was appointed Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and in 2015 he was appointed full professor at the Institute of Clinical Medicine to the Arctic University in Tromsø.

He played several key roles within the European Stroke Organisation, including those of Chair of the Board of Directors, Chair of the Trials Network Committee, member of Guidelines Board and member of the Editorial Board of the European Stroke Journal.

In his personal life, despite his tremendous work ethic and many clinical and academic commitments, he remained deeply committed to his wife and to family life. He practiced as he preached, always physically active (he cycled the 500 km from Trondheim to Oslo several times), with a wide range of friends and had interests outside medicine, including music. Eivind is survived by his physician wife Hilde, and three grown-up children Sindre, Trude Elisabeth and Sivert, of whom two are already working as medical doctors. He will be much missed.