Committee Members

Mrs Eileen Gill: Co-ordinator of Ekbom Support Group
Dr. K. Ray Chaudhuri: Neurologist and Chairman
Dr. D. MacMahon: Physician and Public Relations
Prof AHV Schapira: Neurologist and Research Supervisor
Dr DJ Burn: Neurologist and Treasurer
Dr. L. Tillyer: Haematologist
Dr. A. Williams: Sleep Physician and Research Supervisor
Dr. L Appiah-Kubi: Co-ordinator
Mr M King: Sleep Physician
Professor David Brooks: Neurologist
Dr. B Burchell: Psychologist
Dr. P Stilman: General Practitioner
Prof Chris Cairns: Pharmacologist
Miss Susanne Tluk: RLS Coordinator and Nurse

RLS:UK Committee Members

Spent 30 years in the teaching profession, at the same time suffering from RLS.
After retiring, read everything I could find (mainly in library) on RLS.
On discovering it was called Ekbom's Syndrome, formed The Ekbom Support Group in 1988.
In the last 15 years have received over 15,000 requests for information from sufferers and the medical profession.
Am very pleased to join Dr. Chaudhuri and his colleagues in the newly formed RLS:UK. group and give the group the benefit of my experience.

Dr K Ray Chaudhuri trained as a neurologist in Calcutta, India and graduated with a national merit from high school. He subsequently trained in Leicester and London (UK). He gained experience in Movement Disorders and particularly Parkinson’s disease (PD) and worked in internationally renowned centres such as the Hammersmith Hospital, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queens Square, Kings College Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital in London. He was appointed as Consultant Neurologist and Honorary Senior Lecturer at Kings College Hospital and the University Hospital of Lewisham in 1995. He is also a recognised teacher and active researcher within the Guy’s, Kings and St Thomas School of Medicine. He has several national and international committee positions and serves as a member of the steering group of the Medicines Management Committee for the Department of Health, UK. He is also recognised as one of the top twenty Parkinsonologists in the United Kingdom.

Dr Chaudhuri has pursued an active interest in Parkinson’s Disease, is the author of more than 100 publications and book chapters and has contributed extensively to educational radio and television interviews, newspaper articles and videos. He has also lectured extensively on Parkinson’s Disease and Restless Legs Syndrome at international meetings in Japan, continental Europe, India and Australia. He is currently the co-director of the Regional Movement Disorders Clinic at Kings College Hospital and Director of the Regional Parkinson’s Disease clinic at Lewisham University Hospital and the President of the Lewisham Branch on the Parkinson’s Disease Society. In addition, he is also the UK lead clinician for a national project auditing quality of life and drug treatment in people with Parkinson’s and Chairman of the UK Restless Legs Syndrome Group. His major research interests are drug treatment of Parkinson’s Disease and Restless Legs Syndrome, Parkisnonism in minority ethnic groups within the UK and abroad and sleep problems in Parkinson’s.

Dr. Doug MacMahon - Consultant Physician with special responsibility for the elderly and lead physician, Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS Trust. Trained in London, Portsmouth, and Oxford. He has particular interests in Parkinson's disease (PD), community care and rehabilitation. Past chair of the British Geriatrics Society (BGS) Policy Committee, PDS Nurse steering group and BGS Parkinson's Section and is a member of several editorial boards. He has written over 70 publications and 19 book chapters, predominantly on PD, its management and on health care policy for older people. He has presented at many national and international meetings and developed the PD Academy to enhance PD care throughout the UK.

Anthony Schapira (MD) is Chairman of the University Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Royal Free and University College Medical School, and Professor of Clinical Neurology at the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square. He is Director of Research and Development and Clinical Head of Service for Neurosciences at the Royal Free Hospital NHS Trust, and Chairman of the Clinical Research Network for all clinical services for University College London.

Dr Burn is Consultant and Senior Lecturer in Neurology at the Regional Neurosciences Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne. He qualified from Oxford University and Newcastle upon Tyne Medical School in 1985. His MD, carried out at the MRC Cyclotron Unit, Hammersmith Hospital, was in the functional imaging of parkinsonism. He runs Movement Disorders clinics in Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland.

He is a member of the Medical Advisory panels for the PSP (Europe) Association and National Tremor Foundation and is on the Editorial Board for the journals "Movement Disorders" and "Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation". Clinical research interests include non-motor complications of Parkinson's disease, the interface between Parkinson's disease and dementia and progressive supranuclear palsy. He has published more than 75 articles on movement disorders.

Dr Williams graduated from University College Hospital, London and, after training in General Medicine there, took up a lectureship at The Cardiothoracic Institute, Brompton Hospital, working for Professor Lynne Reid, investigating the pulmonary changes associated with chronic liver disease. Her appointment at Harvard in 1975 took Dr Williams to Boston where his interest in sleep began with the investigation of S.I.D.S. and publication of a definitive study implicating obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) as a cause of the syndrome¹ as well as near-miss S.I.D.S.

An invitation to U.C.L.A. in 1977 to take up a post as Chest Physician allowed this early interest in OSA (and the surviving near-miss infants) to extend into adulthood with the very first reports of OSA causing hypertension² and of oximetry as a natural diagnostic tool³. Home-built nasal CPAP was first used in 1981 and then nasal ventilation for the first time in 1988 ⁴. In 1985 Dr Williams became tenured Professor of Medicine at U.C.L.A. and Co-Director of U.C.L.A’s Sleep Laboratory.

As Sleep Medicine gelled as a specialty, Dr Williams became an accredited polysomnographer and later member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and as such has mentored more than twenty trainees.

At St Thomas’s Hospital, London, he has developed one of the UK’s only comprehensive sleep services with continued interest in Sleep Disordered Breathing and its treatment ⁵, the first U.K. report of REM Behaviour Disorder ⁶, the first reports of the genetics of Phase Delay Syndrome^7,8, and the genetics of snoring and R.L.S. in the St Thomas’s Twin Cohort, along with unique explorations of the link between orexin and sleepiness ⁹ and the setting of U.K. medico-legal case law (sleepwalking as a defence for drink driving). Most recently Dr Williams has developed an Insomnia Research Program focusing on drug studies and the role of cognitive behaviour therapy.

Dr Williams is a Diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine, a founding member of The British Sleep Foundation, the Sleep Medicine Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, and the R.L.S. UK Group.

References:

1. Williams AJ, Vawter G, Reid L: Increased Muscularity of the Pulmonary Circulation in Victims of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
   Paediatrics 63: 18-23, 1979.
2. Williams AJ, Houston S, Finberg S, Lam C, Kinney J, Santiago S: Sleep Apnoea Syndrome and Esential Hypertension.
   Am J Cardiol 55: 1019-22, 1985.
3. Williams AJ, Yu G, Santiago S, Stein M: Screening for sleep apnoea using Oximetry and a clinical score.
   Chest 100: 631-35, 1991.
4. Epstein L, Peleg N, Williams AJ, Koyal S: The efficacy of nasal mechanical ventilation following uvulopalatopharyngoplasty.
   Am Rev Res Dis 137: A463, 1988.
5. Chalmers RM, Howard RS, Wiles CM, Hirsch NP, Miller DH, Williams AJ: Respiratory Insufficiency in Neuronopathic and Neuropathic Disorders.
6. Clarke NA, Williams AJ, Kopelman MD: REM Behaviour Disorder in Dementia.
   J Psych. 176: 189-192, 2000.
7. Robilliard D et al. The 3111 clock gene polymorphism.
   J Sleep Res 11; 1-8, 2002.
8. Ebrahim IO, Sharief MK, Howard RS, Kopelman MD, Williams AJ. Hypocretin deficiency in human narcolepsy and
   primary hypersomnia.
   J Neurol Neurosurg Psych 74; 127-130, 2003.
   The first European paper on this subject.

Dr Linda Appiah-Kubi graduated from the Guy's King's and St Thomas' School of Medicine and is currently Senior House Officer in medicine rotating between the Hammersmith Hospital and The National Hospital for Neurology, Queen Square, London. Dr Appiah-Kubi served as the co-ordinator for RLS:UK between 2001-2003 and has also contributed to several reviews and published abstracts on RLS. Recently, she has been involved in assessment of patient perception of recognition and treatment of RLS in the UK, in a project jointly with Eileen Gill from the Ekbom Supprt Group.

Martin King is the Head of the Papworth Sleep Laboratory. He is the Secretary of the British Sleep Society, member of the European Sleep Research Society and other international associations and working groups.

With a basic science background and training in the USA, his passion for Sleep was stirred in the 1980's. He has particular expertise in device development which includes new measurement techniques, the UK's first commercial computerized polysomnography system and CPAP machines. Determined to be instrumental in the formation of a UK Polysleep Disorders Centre, he has supported and promoted a culture which embraces Sleep Medicine as a distinct specialty and one which is inclusive of all the different professionals working in this area.

He has presented work at international meetings, published in peer reviewed journals and authored book chapters. Having established a comprehensive sleep assessment centre, he has also formed an experienced site for pharmaceutical and medical devices studies. He remains actively involved in the clinical, research and multi-centre trial work of his centre.

David Brooks is Hartnett Professor of Neurology and Head of the Department of Sensorimotor Systems in the Division of Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London. He is also Head of the Neurology Group at the Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith Hospital, London.

He is a member of the International Research Advisory Board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Disease Research, a member of the Research Advisory Panel of the UK Parkinson's Disease Society (Chairman 1996-7) and UK Huntington's Disease Association. He was Chairman of the Scientific Issues Committee of the Movement Disorder Society 1998-2002 and of the Council of Management of the UK Parkinson's Disease Society 1997-8. He is on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, the Journal of Neural Transmission, and Synapse and was on the editorial board of Movement Disorders 1994-1998. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Science, UK and in 2002 asked to give the Stan Fahn Lecture at the International Congress of Movement Disorders, Miami.

Employment

2000- Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, and Fellow, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

1990-2000 Lecturer, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, and Fellow, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge

1985-1990 Research Officer, Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge

1984-1985 Temporary Lecturer in Computing and Statistics, Psychology Division, The City University

Research Interests

The effects of labour market experiences (eg job insecurity, work intensification, bankruptcy, unemployment) on psychological well-being. The social psychological effects of precarious employment and unemployment. Analysis of complex work and life histories data. Gender segregation, men's and women's life cycle and career. Blood Doning and Restless Leg Syndrome

Recent research grants, from Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Dept of Trade and Industry, the ESRC and Royal College of Midwives.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS (SINCE 1997)

Books

Burchell, B. J., D. Ladipo, and F. Wilkinson, Eds. (2001). Job Insecurity and Work Intensification. London, Routledge.

Fraser, C., B. J. Burchell, et al., Eds. (2001). Introducing Social Psychology. Cambridge, Polity. http://www.polity.co.uk/socialpsychology/

Burchell, B.J., S. Deakin, J. Michie & J. Rubery (2003) Systems of Production: Markets, Organisations and Performance. London: Routledge.

Burchell, B., Day, D., Hudson, M., Ladipo, D., Mankelow, R., Nolan, J., Reed, H., Wichert, I. and Wilkinson, F. 1999. Job Insecurity and work intensification; flexibility and the changing boundaries of work. York: York Publishing. ISBN 1 902633 41 5.

Refereed Journal Articles

Burchell, B. and Wilkinson, F. (1997). 'Trust, Business arrangements and contractual environment'. Cambridge Journal of Economics 2: 217-237.

Burchell, B. (1999). 'The unequal distribution of job insecurity 1966-1986'. International Review of Applied Economics 13: 439-460.

Susanne Tluk is an experienced nurse having worked in neurology and neurosurgery wards in Bremerhaven, Germany before she started her current work in the UK. She is attached to University Hospital Lewisham as Research co-ordinator and is also working with Eillen Gill to support the ESG. Susanne has an active interest in research and is also co-ordinating several research trials in RLS.