ESPGHAN Podcast

Welcome back, ESPGHAN podcast listeners! Today’s discussant is Dr Tassos Grammatikopoulos, of King’s College Hospital in London, and today’s theme is portal hypertension in children, an academic interest of Dr G. Tassos, Dr Grammatikopoulos, would you please oblige me at the appropriate moment with a rimshot? I’ll cue you. Gastroenterologists and hepatologists interested in portal hypertension hav...

Podcast listeners, we’re here today from ESPGHAN with the berry-picked best and freshest of what your society had to offer at its 58th Annual Meeting in Lille from 24 through 27 June. Mind you, “the best” reflects the opinion of our discussant, Dr Elena Cernat – she’s done the culling and the selecting. We should go into Dr Cernat’s background a bit. She comes from southeastern Romania and began h...

Hello, trouble! Yes, we here at ESPGHAN Podcasting Central mean you, our loyal listener. But you’re only the best kind of trouble, and we’re happy to see you again. Today’s guest is Prof Tudor Pop, from Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s second city. Transylvania, the region in northern Romania in which his hometown lies, has a long and complex ethnic history. Thus, you may know Romanian Cluj-Napoca as the Sa...

Well, would you look at that! Here’s another friend of ESPGHAN podcasting coming by to see what we have for listeners today. Welcome, and settle in for a session with a real mover and shaker, Dr Ilse Broekaert, who oversees ESPGHAN’s educational activities, and who has led efforts to introduce Europe-wide certification in paediatric gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition – more about this, ho...

Good morning, evening, afternoon — whenever and wherever you may be — ESPGHAN is bringing you another podcast, this one, as we say in Hungary, egy unikum, a one-off and a first for this series. We’ve done gastroenterologists and hepatologists to death, really; it’s long been time for a new start, a new star. And we’ve found him in Dr Timothy Morris of Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, a Paedia...

Mireia Alcázar López and Giulia Fiore are early-career nutrition scientists focusing on the relationship between the gut microbiome and obesity in children. Dr. Alcázar trained at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Reus campus) in Catalonia, while Dr. Fiore trained at multiple institutions in Milan and conducted collaborative research in Reus with Dr. Alcázar. Their research investigates how caregiver...

Welcome to the third ESPGHAN Journal Club of 2026, with Dr Jake Mann! Jake has chosen for today’s session two studies in eosinophilic oesophagitis – for convenience’ sake, henceforward “EOE”. One describes an interesting rise in instances of diagnosed EOE in two regions of Spain; the other provides data suggesting that to assess EOE by both histopathologic and molecular-biologic criteria as bipart...

Dr. Elvira Verduci is a physician and clinical nutritionist at the University of Milan, where she heads the Division of Metabolic Diseases at Vittore Buzzi Children’s Hospital. She maintains a rare-disease registry for congenital defects in amino-acid metabolism and transport and serves as secretary to ESPGHAN’s Nutrition Committee. Her research interests include metabolic programming and childhoo...

Anna Walker is a specialist paediatric dietitian at Bristol Royal Hospital. She has a diverse international background, having been raised in Finland and educated in the United States, England, and Finland, with professional experience spanning Finland, Norway, England, and Cambodia. Her work focuses on dietetic care for children with obesity, particularly exploring the potential links between obe...

Dr. Hubert P. J. van der Doef of Beatrix Children’s Hospital and the University Medical Centre Groningen, The Netherlands, trained in Utrecht and completed a fellowship in paediatric gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition at Groningen. He initially worked on cystic fibrosis but has since focused on vascular complications in pediatric liver transplantation, particularly how to identify and man...

Prof Dr Yvan Vandenplas, Associate Editor of Nutrients, trained in medicine with specialty training in paediatrics at the Free University of Brussels. From the completion of his paediatric training in 1986, he moved seamlessly into an appointment in 1987 as head of the University Hospital Brussels unit for paediatric gastroenterology and nutrition. He served as Chair of Paediatrics there from 1994...

A round of applause, dear readers: We’ve made it into, good Heavens, 2026! Breasted the tape? Or limped across the finish line? No matter. To mis-quote Scripture, that is of course Stephen Sondheim: We’re still here. Among the “we,” and our lodestar, is Dr Jake Mann. He’s selected two articles for consideration: From Jezequel M et al., in work done at Lille, J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr brings us...

Dr. Christos Tzivinikos graduated in 1999 from the Medical School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. After several years serving as a medical officer aboard ships in the Greek navy, he began specialty training in paediatrics in the United Kingdom in 2005. Further training in gastroenterology followed between 2012 and 2015, culminating in a consultancy at Alder Hey Children’s Hosp...

In 1990, Prof. Holm Uhlig entered the School of Medicine at the University of Leipzig – a city in Saxony with a long and turbulent history. The University, founded in 1409, had survived centuries of upheaval, including the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, when Napoleon’s forces were defeated and King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony was taken prisoner. Studying medicine in Leipzig during the 1990s meant n...

Dr. Agata Stróżyk, a dietitian at the Medical University of Warsaw, shared her expertise on the “food ladder” in both theory and practice, providing insights for clinicians, patients, and families. She addresses questions such as: Could you explain what a food ladder is? What steps does a child typically go through during the food ladder process? What are the key benefits of milk and egg reintro...

Your ESPGHAN podcast team are collecting expertise from as many learnèd, skilled, and experienced paediatric gastroenterologists and hepatologists as possible! Oh, and from dietitians… they’re among the most important links in the chain between gastroenterologist and the universal goal – a healthy child and a happy family. Today’s note accompanies an encounter with Dr Elin Malmberg Hård af Segerst...

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear –Duck! Here comes another year! Well, readers, when this reaches you perhaps we shall all be in 2026, perhaps not; whichever, the New Year’s Eve couplet above may amuse you as you look backward, or forward, and… but who says that time has to be linear? Very twentieth-century idea, that – we’ve made progress since then. In any case, whenever this is, here we are....

Young ESPGHAN is on a roll! Today one of that group, a representative on the Education Committee, tries his hand at podcast interviewing: Dr Vangelis Giamouris was granted his medical degree at the University of Thessaly, trained in paediatrics in Athens at the Agia Sofia Children’s Hospital, and at present works at King’s College Hospital (London). He offers three clinical scenarios that involve ...

Greetings from Helsinki, where your ESPGHAN podcast team have taken the opportunity to buttonhole for interviews as many learnèd, skilled, and experienced paediatric gastroenterologists and hepatologists as possible! We haven’t forgotten the allied professions, mind you; this note accompanies for you an encounter recorded at the 2025 ESPGHAN Annual Meeting with Dr Kathryn Bradley, a clinical psych...

Happy holidays, everyone! The end of the year… twilight falls in mid-afternoon, there’s frost on the windscreen of a morning, and between mince pies and gingerbread, the supermarket aisles are an absolute menace. But there’s hope: ESPGHAN Journal Club is here to educate, to inform, and to keep you out of trouble – whilst you’re with us you’re not flexing those credit cards, are you? Here today is...

Welcome to the ESPGHAN podcast! Yes, it’s another of our series of interviews obtained at the sponsoring organisation’s annual meeting in Helsinki, today with Heather Norris, from Bristol. Ms. Norris trained as a dietitian – went slightly off-piste with two years of education in youth work and theology – and thereafter specialised first in paediatric nutrition and then, for the last fifteen years,...

Once again it’s been an unfair contest here in the ESPGHAN podcast-recording studio, little me on one side, on the other Dr. Etna Masip Simó of Valencia and Dr. Liron Birimberg-Schwartz of Jerusalem – you listeners have ringside seats for the battle, which of course Dr. Birimberg-Schwartz and Dr. Masip won without so much as trying. They are experts in the nutritional dysregulation that results fr...

It’s ESPGHAN Journal Club, and—good heavens—it’s already November! Where did 2025 go? Lovely crisp sunny days, duvet-plus-blanket nights with very clingy cats, and foggy mornings with a fire in the woodstove to warm the kitchen and boil the kettle. After a nice cup of tea, let’s go shuffle-kick through the leaf piles with Dr. Jake Mann. Jake’s choices for today: From J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr,...

From Petah-Tikva, Israel – no map in your head? A tad east of Tel Aviv – at Schneider Children’s Medical Center, Dr. Anat Guz-Mark came to Helsinki for the ESPGHAN annual meeting, where this interview was recorded. Her particular interest and expertise lie in intestinal failure and its therapies, with surgical short-bowel syndrome, paediatric intestinal pseudo-obstruction, and a variety of congeni...

Joint work, or collective work, holds out substantial promise for advancing our understanding of how pathophysiology evolves over time and how best to alter the course of disease. ESPGHAN fosters such collaboration – the podcast that this note accompanies is a good example. A recently established registry of children with portal hypertension and its complications illustrates this effort. In this e...