Subventions financées

Before dementia occurs, the brain has issues getting enough energy and blood flow. This causes subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and is an early warning sign for dementia. Exercise and ketone supplements may help correct these problems.

Even though memory loss is one of the most debilitating features of dementia, several studies has revealed the ability of music to trigger the recall of old memories is relatively preserved in people living with dementia. Yet, we don’t exactly what feature of music activates memories. This goal of this project is to answer this question by studying how features of music, personal familiarity and emotional quality, can help improve memory for people living with dementia.

As humans, we are constantly making decisions, and those decisions are heavily influenced by how our environment shapes our thought and behavioral patterns. This process – the ability to adapt your behavioural strategy in the face of changing environmental conditions – is often referred to as cognitive flexibility. In ideal conditions, cognitive flexibility allows us to adapt our behavior in optimal ways.

Considering that sleep disturbances brought on by shift work, nighttime light pollution from technology (e.g., TVs, phones, tablets, computers, etc.), and other factors (e.g., stress, anxiety, depression, etc.) are common in modern society, we established a maternal sleep disruption model to study the impact of sleep disturbances on offspring brain development and behaviour.

Circadian rhythms are an adaptation to the daily cycle of night and day on Earth and control when an individual eats, sleeps, or works. One third of Canadians suffer from difficulty sleeping, and circadian disruptions to sleep are often associated with psychiatric diseases. For example, circadian disruptions may predispose patients to disease, or could be symptoms.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a common and serious illness in which people keep drinking despite major harms. Even with today’s best medications and addiction treatments, relapse is frequent, and severe AUD can shorten life expectancy by many years.

Cellular immunotherapy is an exciting new way of treating disease by using the body’s own immune system to find and destroy cancer cells. This approach has great promise for treating glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive and hardest-to-treat brain cancers.

As we age, the brain naturally changes, sometimes making it harder to remember things, stay focused, or think as quickly as we used to. Despite these changes, the aging brain still has an important ability called plasticity: it can adapt and reorganize itself. Harnessing this ability may help us support brain health later in life.