Diederik van Dijk

Diederik van Dijk is an epidemiologist and anaesthesiologist-intensivist. His research focuses on outcomes after cardiac surgery and intensive care admission, and he has multiple publications in NEJM, JAMA, Circulation and Anesthesiology. In the Octopus trial, he demonstrated that cognitive decline may also occur after cardiac surgery without heartlung-machine. Another multicenter trial supervised by Van Dijk failed to show any benefits of epidural anesthesia in cardiac surgery patients. A more recent trial in 4,500 cardiac surgery patients, evaluating prophylactic intraoperative dexamethasone showed multiple benefits of this drug in patients younger than 75 yrs of age. In 2012, Van Dijk was appointed professor of Intensive Care medicine. Since 2021, he is chair of the department of intensive care at the UMC Utrecht.