Areas of research
Prof Leo Bonati, MD, is a clinical Neurologist with special expertise in cerebrovascular disease. His current clinical position is CEO and Chief Medical Director at Reha Rheinfelden, a large rehabilitation hospital with a main focus on neurorehabilitation. He is Research Group Leader at the Department of Clinical Research of the University of Basel.
Prof Bonati’s main research focus is on carotid artery disease. He is Principal Investigator and Steering Committee Member of several international clinical trials investigating carotid artery stenting, carotid endarterectomy and medical therapy in patients with carotid disease. Prof. Bonati is the Coordinator of the Carotid Stenosis Trialists Collaboration (CSTC), a collaboration between four leading international research groups in the field of carotid disease with the aim of performing pooled analyses of radomised trial data to select the best treatment for individual patients.
Prof. Bonati is a Steering Committee Member of the Swiss Atrial Fibrillation Cohort Study (Swiss-AF), a large national multicentric cohort aiming to improve clinical management and investigating clinical and subclinical brain injury as well as cognitive decline in patients with atrial fibrillation.
A particular area of Prof Bonati’s expertise is the study of silent vascular brain lesions on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as surrogate endpoints in clinical trials and observational studies. Silent brain infarcts visible on MRI are known to occur about twice as often as clinically manifest strokes. Implementation of MRI in prospective studies increases the power to detect treatment effects and risk factor associations, which is of particular use in limited sample sizes. Prof Bonati has extensive experience in the use MRI-based outcome assessment in interventional trials on safety and efficacy of revascularisation treatment and antiplatelet therapy in cerebrovascular atherosclerosis.
Finally, Prof Bonati has coordinated the national implementation of the Swiss Stroke Registry, which captures standardised health outcomes in all patients with acute cerebrovascular disease admitted to primary and comprehensive Stroke Centers in Switzerland (>10’000 patients per year). The Swiss Stroke Registry serves as a central platform for quality assurance, health services research, and prospective observational and interventional studies in acute cerebrovascular disease.
Recently initiated research includes the study of endoscopic evacuation of intracerebral haemorrhage and telemedicine in post-stroke rehabilitation.