Subventions financées

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.

One in ten youth have migraine, a female-dominant disease with disabling attacks of moderate-to-severe headache. Current treatment plans are not very effective and occur after the pain starts, even though symptoms and changes in the brain appear earlier (known as the prodrome phase).

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a progressive brain disorder that primarily affects thinking, behavior, and social interactions. It is the most common form of dementia in adults under 65 and places a heavy burden on patients, families, and healthcare systems. Despite this, we still lack effective treatments, partly because the brain mechanisms that cause symptoms are poorly understood.

The brain relies on precise control of gene expression to support learning, memory, and healthy communication between neurons. One important way cells achieve this control is through chemical marks added to RNA molecules, the messages that tell cells which proteins to make.

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.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) incurs staggering harm to individuals, families, healthcare systems, and society. In Ontario (2020), opioids drove 2415 deaths and costs of $2.73 billion. Unfortunately, treatments are severely limited, with a ~70% relapse rate. An untapped approach is deep brain stimulation (DBS), a well-tolerated brain stimulation procedure to focally stimulate dysfunctional neurocircuitry.

Every year, more than 165,000 Canadians experience a traumatic brain injury (TBI). For many, recovery is incomplete, leading to long-lasting cognitive, and emotional impairments and loss of physical independence. A major contributor to physical disability is damage to neurons in the brain’s cortex that normally connect to the corticospinal tract, the brain’s high-speed wiring system responsible for voluntary movement of the hands, arms, and legs.

Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) causes the activation of a key nerve support cell called microglia. We recently discovered that microglia are important for spontaneous recovery of function after SCI, as they protect healthy spinal cord tissue from neighbouring injured and inflamed spinal tissue.