Funded Grants

Alzheimer’s disease affects hundreds of thousands of Canadians, yet not everyone is affected in the same way. Black, Hispanic, and lower-income older adults often experience higher rates of dementia, but we do not fully understand why.

Many older adults notice changes in memory or thinking before these changes appear on standard cognitive tests. This stage, called subjective cognitive decline, can sometimes be an early warning sign of future dementia.

We need new ways to treat Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). People with AD are keen to try non-drug therapies but none are approved for treating AD. Remote ischemic conditioning (RIC) is a non-drug therapy that involves inflating and deflating blood pressure cuffs repeatedly in the arm or leg.

The clock drawing test is a simple, familiar task — patients are asked to draw a clock — that doctors have used for decades to check for memory and thinking problems. Today it is usually scored only as a pass or fail, even though the drawing holds far richer clues about a person’s thinking skills. Our project, Clock2Vec, uses artificial intelligence to read a photo of a hand-drawn clock and identify specific patterns of errors.

Alzheimer's disease causes memory loss due to progressive brain damage. Current treatments only offer modest symptomatic relief, highlighting the need for new approaches.

Alzheimer’s disease can affect memory and thinking by changing how brain cells communicate. Our project looks at early changes in the hippocampus, a part of the brain important for learning and memory.

At present, there is no effective treatment to arrest the progression of Alzheimer disease (AD) - the most common cause of dementia affecting the elderly. The disease is caused by accumulation of two distinct clumps of proteins in the brain called neuritic plaques and neurofibrillary tangles formed by amyloid beta peptide and tau protein, respectively.