Publication of june  2025

  • La santé à Bruxelles en 2050: regards croisés sur les défis de demain

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La santé à Bruxelles en 2050

The exposome, climate change, and health

Introduced by Chris Wild in 2005, the concept of the exposome refers to the totality of exposures experienced by an individual or population over a lifetime. In recent years, various contributions have enriched this concept, earning it a central place in the field of environment and health. Advances in analytical chemistry, toxicology, epidemiology, systems biology, modeling, social sciences, and environmental sciences have helped to better define the objectives of exposome research and the methods and tools used to explore it. Climate change is essentially reflected by a transformation of the exposome. This perspective is valuable from a prevention standpoint: on the one hand, our health in 25 years strongly depends on our current and future exposures; on the other hand, these exposures are modifiable by nature, which highlights our collective and individual responsibility.

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La santé à Bruxelles en 2050

4P medicine and artificial intelligence: learning in coalition...

4P medicine (predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory) aims to improve quality of life by anticipating and treating diseases early thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and health data exploitation. While vaccines have increased life expectancy from 30 to 70 years, medicine’s new challenge is to ensure a healthy life for as many people as possible until the end. This new objective is essential for keeping healthcare costs manageable in an aging society.

In Brussels, the spinoff company Intuitim (medical imaging analysis for breast cancer screening), the City-Labs initiative (rapid access to medical analyses), and participatory tools such as Manzana (diabetology) and PSEE (psychiatry) are concrete pilot experiments of these technologies conducted by the St. Luc Clinics and UCLouvain.

The risk of medical determinism, data protection, and equitable access to digital care raise new challenges: responsible and ethical integration of AI is essential to ensuring precision medicine that combines technological innovation with respect for human values.

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La santé à Bruxelles en 2050

Health and social vulnerabilities: a shared view of Brussels

This text follows the roundtable discussion, “Health and social vulnerabilities”, which was held as part of the “Health in Brussels 2050” symposium organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of UCLouvain in Brussels. The event brought together social and health institutions, associations, non-governmental organizations, and researchers to discuss challenges and initiatives related to healthcare for disadvantaged populations.

The seven panelists were invited to start their presentation with a photograph illustrating their daily reality, which they then briefly described to raise public awareness of urban health issues that are often invisible. The discussion was enriched by audience participation and addressed key topics, such as access to healthcare and support for the most vulnerable populations.

To conclude, each participant chose a keyword that represented their hope or aspiration for Brussels in 2050. Rather than providing verbatim transcripts of the exchanges, this article summarizes testimonies from healthcare and support facilities for the most fragile individuals, along with the keywords chosen by the panelists. Together, these elements outline a shared vision for a more inclusive and supportive healthcare future in Brussels

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La santé à Bruxelles en 2050

Which ethics for the ethics of artificial intelligence?

Contemporary development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is not without ethics. In fact, we are witnessing an increase in ethical charters and initiatives. However, this completely leaves in the shadows the question of the implicit background to our ethical reflection: the temporal and spatial framing of ethics. The article begins by highlighting the fact that certain individuals are attempting to impose a vision of the future, with some authors even speaking of the “colonization of the future”. Second, it emphasizes the fact that ethical discussions on AI are frequently influenced by narratives that impose a scenography on reflection, namely the relationship between man and machine, which is localized and extracted from an organizational and social context. This temporal and spatial framing shapes the way we ask ethical questions and focuses our attention on certain elements of the situation. At the same time, it constitutes an “off-field”. This article invites us to develop an “ethics of attention”: Beyond the question of which ethical principles to mobilize, what do we pay attention to when considering the ethics of AI?

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Médecine et sciences sociales

What digital innovation does to health

In her article, Sarah Sandré revisits the key arguments from her book, What Innovation Does to Health, published by L’Harmattan in 2024. She provides an overview of the growing popularization of digital health among the public during the 2010s, how digital actors gained legitimacy, and the impact on the healthcare sector a decade later. These new players call for new evaluation methods and risk management approaches, especially given the aura surrounding digital technology and innovation

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Nutrition clinique

New developments in clinical nutrition

On November 23, 2024, the annual clinical nutrition symposium took place at the UCLouvain Brussels Woluwe site. It was organized by the Comité Liaison Alimentation Nutrition (CLAN) and the Food and Dietetics Department of the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc. The event brought together more than 200 participants and was highly successful. Six presentations were delivered by expert dietitians, nurses, and physicians, covering a wide variety of topics such as contaminants in our food, new nutritional challenges for cystic fibrosis patients, hospital meals, dysphagia, refeeding syndrome, and celiac disease. The symposium was characterized by dynamic interactions between speakers and team-based presentations, making it a particularly engaging event. In this manuscript, we briefly summarized each presentation along with the names and roles of the speakers.

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STOPP/START.v2

The tool STOPP / START.v2 allows evaluation of drug treatments prescribed to patients age 65 and older.

 

This tool, designed for all care settings, stimulates thinking and challenging medication taken by patients, especially drugs forcardiovascular and nervous system.

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