Greet Van den Berghe

Greet Van den Berghe (born 1960) is a Belgian physician and intensive care researcher. Since 2002 she has been the head of the Department of Intensive Care of the University Hospital of Leuven and head of the Laboratory of Intensive Care Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven. Her research has focused on the endocrine and metabolic responses to critical illness, including blood-glucose control and nutritional support in intensive care.

Biography Born in 1960, Van den Berghe studied medicine at KU Leuven in Belgium and the University of Bristol in the UK and graduated in 1985. In 2001, she led a randomised study of surgical intensive-care patients which reported that intensive insulin therapy reduced morbidity and mortality. Her research group subsequently conducted studies on the timing of artificial nutrition in intensive care. She helped design the adult EPaNIC trial and was a co-author of its main report. The study found that delaying parenteral nutrition until the eighth day of intensive care was associated with faster recovery and fewer complications than beginning it earlier. She was also the senior author of the international PEPaNIC trial, which examined the same question in critically ill children. The trial reported that withholding parenteral nutrition during the first week of intensive care resulted in fewer new infections and shorter intensive-care stays than providing it early.

Honours and awards

Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium (1999). Elected member of Academia Europaea (2015). European Medal from the Society for Endocrinology (2021).