PENSA Newsletter January-April 2004, Vol.5 No.1 Message From Editor Dear PENSA members: Happy new year to you all. Now we come to the year that we going to have a special events to cerebrate the 10th anniversary of PENSA. We have come through a long way since the first meeting of the founder members of PENSA in Chiangrai, Thailand since 1994. Those members, Prof. Chomchark Chuntarasakul, Prof. Hideaki Saito, Prof. Zhu-Ming Jiang, Prof. Sun Sunatrio have met there to establish the first cooperation among seven Asian countries and now we have nine member countries within Asia with close cooperations with PEN Societies in other continents such as ESPEN, ASPEN and lastly, the PEN society of Australia. This year we are going to cerebrate the 10th anniversary of PENSA by coming back to Thailand for the 10th Scientific congress in October 26th-29th, 2004. However, the congress venue is not at Chiangrai, but at Pattaya. The city which is less than 2-hour drive from Bangkok is very famous for its beach, water sports, night-lives, as well as other entertainments. The more important thing about the meeting is the ability to learn and share our knowledge with the world-famous speakers both from Asia and other parts of the world. In this newsletter, you can find three articles : "Future of research in clinical nutrition" by Professor Meguid M, from the "PENSA 2003" in Goa, India, and "Glutamine supplemented total parenteral nutrition reduces plasma interleukin-6 in surgical patients with lower disease severity" by Ming-Tsan Lin and "Change of Glutamine and Arginine following early nasogastric and nasojejunal feeding" by Tzu-Chi Hsu from "The 8th Congress of PENSA" in Kochi, Japan. The studies of immunonutrition especially Glutamine and Arginine have been very popular during the past few years with more and more data to support their benefits on outcome of critically ill patients. We should be proud that many of the studies were done in our Asian countries Wish to see you all in Pattaya in October this year. Those who are interesting in joining the meeting can visit our website at http://www.pensa.org or request for the second announcement at Research Center for Nutritional Support, 4th floor Dept. of Nutrition Bldg, Siriraj Hospital, Plannok Rd, Bangkoknoi, Bangkok 10700. Thailand.