Transcript
Olivia Chelko: Good morning everyone, and welcome to Spinal CSF Leak Bridging the Gap 2025. We are honored to have both patient and physician communities joining us from around the world. As you know by now, this conference is presented by Dr. Callen and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in partnership with the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation. I would like to begin by expressing our gratitude to the university for their support and Dr. Callen, our course director, for his continued leadership and initiative. This collaboration helps ensure that this unique conference remains sustainable, accessible, and that we hope continues for years to come. Dr. Callen, thank you for your time and commitment to ensuring this conference highlights both the latest research and the patient perspective.
For those I have not met yet, my name is Olivia Chelko, and I have the honor of serving as the Foundation’s new executive director. I have spent more than 20 years leading healthcare nonprofits focused on HIV, homelessness, domestic violence, and childhood injury prevention. Throughout that work, my focus has always been on uplifting unheard voices, amplifying those voices, improving access to care, and ensuring the funding and resources are in place.
So being able to open a conference where the patient perspective is so intentionally woven throughout every year and every topic, and where patients and physicians are not speaking at separate events but rather building a strong event together, is really deeply meaningful to me.
This perspective is exactly what drew me to the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation. The Foundation supports patients and is an organization that is truly patient led, patient centered, and patient driven. 100% of our board of directors are leak patients. Real progress occurs when we listen to the people who are living this condition every day. I am so excited to bring my background in grant writing, fundraising, and partnerships with corporate, biomedical, and academic institutions to help strengthen and sustain the Foundation’s efforts in education, advocacy, and the upcoming launch of our international patient registry, the ileak registry℠. Together, we are working to leverage the progress we make today for data-driven care and outcomes tomorrow.
I want to thank our board of directors for their expertise, heart, and extraordinary dedication. I want to especially thank Jen MacKenzie, our board treasurer and acting executive this past year, for her steady leadership and onboarding of the Foundation’s finances. And to our board president, Jodi Ettenberg, for leading the organization through this transition. Her time, expertise in this condition, and commitment to the organization have been exceptional. She has been so incredibly generous with her time with me, getting me up to speed on both the organization and the community we serve.
This conference would not be possible without the incredible BTG organizing committee and patient moderators: Jodi Ettenberg, Kyle Spawn, Aubrey Bolan, and Jen MacKenzie. They not only helped plan this year’s event but ensured that last year’s BTG took place even in a transitional time for the Foundation. Thank you as well to all the physicians who have taken their time and their expertise to share with us today, and to two incredible volunteers, Ellen Sung and Leah Leavitt, for donating their time to help make this event a reality.
Before we begin, I would also like to thank everyone who submitted videos and questions for today’s program. The video you will see today is a powerful reflection of this community’s strength, resilience, and shared purpose. Thank you for sharing your voices and for showing what is possible when this community speaks together.
And now it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Andrew Callen. I know we have only known each other for such a short time, but it is clear that you are one of the most compassionate physicians I have ever had the honor of working with in my long career. Your commitment to ensuring that the patient remains central to this conference speaks volumes about who you are as a doctor and a person.
Dr. Callen, over to you.
Dr. Callen: Thank you, Olivia. Good morning everyone. To our patients, our colleagues, our friends, and to all of those joining from around the world. I’m Andrew Callen from the University of Colorado, and it’s truly a privilege to welcome you to the third annual Spinal CSF Leak Bridging the Gap Conference.
Although we’re gathering virtually this year, the spirit of this event has really never felt more alive. In the years since we began, this conference has become something larger than a single meeting. It has sort of become a movement, a collaboration, a community determined to make the invisible visible.
When we first launched Bridging the Gap, the idea was simple. We wanted to create a space where clinicians and patients could learn from one another as equals. And today, that idea has grown into something extraordinary. We’ve seen new discoveries reshape how we think about this condition. From advances in myelography and the detection of CSF-venous fistulas to understanding the true nature of lateral dural tears and post-dural puncture headache to multicenter studies that are transforming how we approach treatment and outcomes.
Each new insight brings the once hidden mechanisms of this disease into focus. And each story shared by a patient reminds us why this work matters. This conference has always been driven by partnership. I want to extend my deepest thanks to the people who made today possible, especially: Jodi Ettenberg, Jen MacKenzie, Aubrey Bolan, Kyle Spawn, and of course Olivia Chelko and all of the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation, whose partnership has made all of this possible.
And of course, I want to thank my expert colleagues and friends, Dr. Jürgen Beck, Dr. Wouter Schievink, and Dr. Ajay Madhavan, who have volunteered their time on a Saturday morning to provide the insights you’re going to hear today. This year’s theme, Making the Invisible Visible, could not be more fitting for this disease in particular. It speaks not only to the science of detection and imaging, but to the act of seeing one another more clearly. Physicians seeing the person behind the scan, patients seeing the progress that once felt impossible, and the community seeing itself reflected in the momentum of these discoveries.
Over the next several hours, you’ll hear from experts who have helped define the modern landscape of spinal CSF leak diagnosis and management. Between these talks, you’ll hear directly from patients whose voices continue to illuminate this path forward — a reminder that knowledge and compassion are not opposing forces, but two halves of the same whole.
A quick note on logistics before we begin. We have a volunteer collecting all of your live questions throughout the day. But because of the high volume, we won’t be able to address every question in real time. But please know that each one is being captured in a separate document, not just flagged in Zoom, so that they can inform future discussions and programming.
As we begin, I ask that we all approach today with the same spirit that gave rise to this conference in the first place, one of curiosity, humility, and a shared purpose. Whether you are a clinician seeking to deepen your understanding, or a patient seeking to be understood, you are an essential part of this conversation. The invisible becomes visible not through technology alone, but through attention, through the act of seeing and listening with intention. That’s what today is about.
So, thank you all for being here, for your time, your courage, your commitment to this community. Together, we will continue to bridge the gap between what is known and what is possible, between data and humanity, and between the silent and the heard.
So, with that, I’m honored to officially welcome you to Bridging the Gap 2025. And I will now turn it over to Jen MacKenzie, who will moderate our first session on post-dural puncture headache.