Welcome to your February newsletter from the World Muscle Society

A happy new year to you and welcome to the first WMS newsletter of 2026.
We have some exciting updates to share this month. Along with my colleagues on the WMS Executive Board, I believe the WMS should offer more for its members. We want to make sure that people see the value in becoming a member and we want to reward our existing members for their continued support of the Society. With that in mind, we have reviewed the prices for all categories of WMS membership and Congress registration and reduced the fees where we can. You can find full details of the price changes in the story on our website.

Let’s also spread the word to our colleagues from low and medium-income countries and to our students. There are huge student discounts and membership grants available to enable everyone who wishes to become a member of our Society! We all want theWMS to be rich in diversity.

As well as reducing the fees, we have looked at other ways we can add value for our members. As we are expecting WMS 2026 in Hiroshima to be particularly popular, we have decided to open registration for members before non-members can register. This will give WMS members two weeks in which to complete their registration and secure their place at the Congress before we open registration to the wider NMD community. At WMS 2025, 670 members registered to attend the Congress compared to a total membership of 882. We know that attending the Congresses is a key reason why people join the WMS and we want to make sure we are rewarding that loyalty.

Hopefully you are aware that as well as the change in leadership of the WMS, there has also been a change at NMD. At the end of 2025, we said goodbye and thank you to Anders Oldfors, who announced his retirement from his role as Editor in Chief of the journal earlier in the year.

At the beginning of 2026, after a three-month handover period with Anders, the new Editor-in-Chief, Chris Weihl, took the lead. Chris is already making his mark at the journal. You can read his first "letter from the editor" and find out about the new early-stage career editorial vacancies he has created in the story below.

Also in this issue of the newsletter, we have updates from some of our regional networks. In Latin America, 200 delegates joined the latest EVELAM summer school in Costa Rica at the end of November; Jorge Bevilacqua has shared the details. And our Africa and the Middle East Regional Network has shared the news of the launch of the Arab Board in Clinical Neurophysiology. You can read more about both of these stories by clicking the links below.

In the coming weeks, I’m looking forward to meeting with the WMS Executive Board and will bring you updates from that meeting in a future newsletter.

Kindest regards,