Bjarke Brandt Hansen, MD, PhD  

Clinical and Academic Background

My professional and academic interests have always been related to the musculoskeletal system. Since my degree in medicine I have worked in several hospitals in the area of Copenhagen. I have worked as an anaesthetist with special interest of pharmacological treatment of chronic pain and ultrasound-guided peripheral nerve blocking. From 2009-2011 I have worked as a junior orthopaedic surgeon and in 2016 I started my specialist training of Rheumatology.

I have an extensive pre-graduate teaching experience and have been affiliated to the Anatomical Institute Copenhagen University since I was a medical student. I am today Associate Professor of anatomy and teacher of the ”Course in Head, Neck, the Locomotor System and the Peripheral Nervous System” for third semester medical students. I have also been involved in the supervision of numerous medical students and physicians, and have been a speaker at pre-graduate, PhD- and post-graduate specialist courses.

Research

I have been affiliated to the Parker Institute’s musculoskeletal imaging research unite, led by Professor Mikael Boesen and Professor Henning Bliddal, since 2011. May 2017 I defended my PhD thesis: “Introducing Standing Weight-Bearing MRI in the Diagnostics of Low Back Pain and Degenerative Spinal Disorders” [1]. My thesis included 3 papers. In my first paper I showed that a substantial risk of fainting (19%) during standing MRI could almost be eliminated by the use of an external pneumatic compression device (2%) [2]. In the second paper I showed that severe disc degeneration in the lumbar spine did not affect the lumbar lordosis angle in the standing position [3]. In the third paper I showed that radiologists’ evaluation of standing MR images have a fair to substantial reliability [4].

Since my PhD I have been affiliated the Parker institute as a part-time post-doc in my spare-time to do research and supervision of medical students and physicians. My primary interest is still new diagnostic modalities for low back pain patients [5–7]. Another field of interest have been biomechanical changes in degenerative changes in the spine. I have shown that adding a lumbar pillow during conventional MRI can increase the diagnostic precision of lumbar spinal stenosis,[8] and a disc herniation change size and shape in the standing position [ahead of publication]. Non-surgery management of low back patients based on prober imaging is essential and I will in near future present data from a large RCT on low back pain patients in physical demanding and in risk of sick leave, the Goback trial [9].

I have also contributed to numbers of other publications[10–14], abstracts, posters and have presented my research at national and international conferences. I am an early stage investigator with an urgent desire to build a research career within diagnostic and management of low back pain patients. Therefore, I am sincerely honoured for being awarded the “Columna Price” by Dansk Selskab for Muskuloskeletal Medicin, DSMM.

Reference Se listen hér

Du kan her læse Bjarke Brandt Hansens PhD afhandling om Stående vægtbærende MRI ved diagnosticering af LBP og degenerationer i columna.