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Klaus Lauer (born 1950) is a German neuroepidemologist, mostly known for his work on multiple sclerosis (MS).
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.
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]
