2024

Condition first discovered by Western neuroscientist named by scientific community
August 14, 2024
While it has been 18 years since Adrian Owen discovered consciousness in patients in a vegetative state, hardly a day has gone by when Western University’s world-renowned neuroscientist doesn’t connect back to his Eureka moment. And now, in a new study published Aug. 15 by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the medical phenomenon officially gets a name: ‘cognitive motor dissociation.’ The paper is co-authored by Owen and more than 50 leading authorities, including neurologists, doctors, imaging experts and research scientists. The acknowledgement of cognitive motor dissociation – labelled colloquially as ‘covert consciousness’ by the Curing Coma campaign – and its formal classification have been a long-time coming for Owen. When the discovery was first made public, some major luminaries in the field disavowed it, with some even calling it a one-off or a fluke.

Research at Western hopes to reveal thoughts and intentions of people with brain injuries
July 23, 2024
It’s the fabric of most people’s nightmares, being stuck inside your mind, with no way of communicating – awake, but unable to respond. A new paper published in Lancet Neurology by Western University scientist Adrian Owen and colleagues hopes to unlock secrets of neuroimaging that could reveal the thoughts, actions, and intentions of people with brain injuries, based on the activity observed in their grey matter. Most importantly, this breakthrough hopes to more accurately predict the survival rate of ICU patients. “Using technology developed at Western, we are now able to detect conscious awareness and even communicate with some patients who appear to be comatose in the ICU following a serious brain injury,” said Owen, professor of cognitive neuroscience and imaging. The hope is that the team’s findings will help inform clinical care, diagnosis, prognosis, ethics, and medical-legal decision making after severe brain injury.

Western-led analysis shows potential for new Alzheimer’s treatment
May 21, 2024
Findings from a phase 2a clinical trial, led by a team of researchers from Western University, Stanford University and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), were recently published in Nature Medicine . The team evaluated a novel therapeutic strategy for enhancing the brain’s resilience to multiple forms of Alzheimer’s related pathology, showing promising results for patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s in its first human trial. Although the trial’s primary purpose was to evaluate the safety and tolerability of the drug in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s, researchers also collected multiple markers of brain pathology to assess whether the drug affected disease progression between baseline and follow-up tests, when compared to placebo. The trial met its primary goals to show safety and tolerability. The team at Western led the analysis of the trial’s multiple secondary and exploratory endpoints, which included cerebrospinal fluid, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) at Robarts. Despite the relatively short 26-week duration, they demonstrated that the drug slowed disease progression on multiple measures.

Comprehensive Epilepsy Clinic at Children’s Hospital receives 2024 HOPE Award
April 19, 2024
The HOPE Award, which stands for ‘Helping out People with Epilepsy,’ is presented annually to a person, group or organization that has made a difference in the lives of people living with epilepsy. It was awarded to the Comprehensive Epilepsy Clinic at Children’s Hospital for the holistic, wrap-around care the team provides to patients diagnosed with a drug-resistant form of the neurological disorder. “About one-third of epilepsy patients will continue to have seizures, despite trials of two or more anti-seizure drugs,” says Dr. Andrea Andrade, Head of Paediatric Neurology and Director of the Paediatric Epilepsy Program at LHSC. “This is why we are here to provide them with highly specialized, state of the art care that can improve their quality of life.” The Comprehensive Epilepsy Clinic is part of Children’s Hospital’s Paediatric Epilepsy Program, which is one of two Regional Paediatric Epilepsy Surgical Centres in Ontario. It provides advanced treatment options, such as the ketogenic diet, new medications and surgical interventions.

Groundbreaking research paves way to AAAS Fellowship for Western scientist
April 18, 2024
With a global reputation as an expert on the effects of viral infections in the brain – a field of study she essentially created – Dr. Robyn Klein has been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) class of Fellows. As a graduate student, Klein began her work in neuroscience with an interest in brain research, an interest that grew while she was in the MD PhD program in New York City in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. Now she looks forward to the next stage of her work using Western’s state-of-the-art facilities, such as the Imaging Pathogens for Knowledge Translation (ImPaKT) facility; and The Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping at Robarts Research Institute, as well as sophisticated touch-screen technology to discern cognition, like memory, decision-making and attention in animal models.

Krembil Foundation funds help researchers investigate role of brain’s immune system in Alzheimer’s
April 18, 2024
Against the backdrop of an aging population, neurodegenerative diseases causing various types of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, are predicted to double every 20 years. One of the challenges in curing Alzheimer’s is solving the riddle of why the brain’s own immune system misfires in response to the beta-amyloid proteins that form plaques in the brain. These plaques initiate a cascade of events that lead to the disruption and eventual death of neurons, resulting in cognitive decline. The research team includes Marco Prado, Vania Prado and Jane Rylett from Schulich Medicine & Dentistry and Greg Fonseca, PhD, a scientist in the Translational Research in Respiratory Diseases Program at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) in Montreal. They have been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the Krembil Foundation for a three-year project titled Determining Why Immune Regulation Fails to Control Neuroinflammation in Alzheimer’s Disease.

Analysis identifies areas for improvement in the overall health of Canadians
April 11, 2024
Understanding the trends in the health of a country’s population is crucial for developing effective public health policies and predicting future demand for health services. Researchers, including Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry Professor Dr. Saverio Stranges, have determined three key areas where Canada’s burden of disease has increased, and found the improvement in overall health of the country’s population has stalled and is trending downwards compared to other high-income countries. In this study , researchers analyzed data from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study to compare Canada’s population health trends to 204 other countries. They found that, while Canadians’ quality of life and life expectancy continue to improve when compared to the 1990s, relative to their peer countries, progress has slowed in Canada in recent years – having levelled off in 2011.

Western draws top number of Early Researcher Awards
March 27, 2024
Taylor Schmitz, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry - Project: "Biomarkers for assessing presymptomatic Alzheimer’s risk and treatment response". Almost one million Canadians currently live with Alzheimer’s disease (AD)-related dementia. Unfortunately, AD remains a poorly understood disease due to its complexity.

Wildlife tracking project receives new Canada Foundation for Innovation funding
March 13, 2024
Western researchers Lisa Saksida and Ravi Menon and their team received $3 million in CFI funding for the Mouse Translational Research Accelerator Platform. The platform supports researchers in better understanding brain function in health and disease, as well as advances in diagnosis and treatment for neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders.

New study expands understanding of brain blood flow and neurological disorders
March 07, 2024
The hippocampus – a seahorse-shaped region of the brain which plays a particularly important role in cognitive aging and memory function – has been studied as a singular region for several years. However, there remains a gap in understanding the factors underlying age- or disease-related changes between the different regions of the hippocampus, or subfields, until now. To get a clearer picture of the structure and function of this crucial region in our brain, the team, involving Ali Khan, PhD, associate professor in the department of Medical Biophysics, and co-led by BrainsCAN postdoctoral associate Roy Haast, developed a process called high-resolution 7 tesla (7T) arterial spin labeling (ASL), a non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method that facilitates measurements of blood flow in the hippocampus.

Neuroscience student works to further Alzheimer’s research and diversify student voices at Western
February 27, 2024
“Alzheimer’s is a disease about which we still know very little,” said Ojiakor, a neuroscience PhD Candidate. For his thesis, Ojiakor is trying to identify the early changes that may occur in the brain of people with a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s. His research investigates how various integrated factors come together to set the brain down the path that might lead to the development of the disease. “By the time you have a formal diagnosis, the disease has probably already progressed too much for anything helpful to be done,” he said. “A lot of the pathological changes that lead to the development of the symptoms that get diagnosed as Alzheimer’s occur long before diagnosis happens.” Developing an understanding of the early pathology of Alzheimer’s could allow for interventions to mitigate the progression of the disease. Now in the final year of his PhD, Ojiakor is hopeful for the future of Alzheimer’s research and confident in his contributions to the global effort to understand the disease.

Oxygenation in the placenta predicts childhood brain growth
February 27, 2024
The connection between placental health and childhood cognition was demonstrated in previous research using ultrasound, but for this study, Duerden, research scientist Emily Nichols and an interdisciplinary team of Western and Lawson researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a far superior and more holistic imaging technique. This novel approach to imaging placental growth allows researchers to study neurodevelopmental disorders very early on in life, which could lead to the development of therapies and treatments.

Neuroscience student, football player tackles early stages of Alzheimer’s
January 31, 2024
Hayley Shanks may be a wide receiver for Western’s women’s football team, but when the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry student is off the field, she’s tackling Alzheimer’s disease. As a third-year PhD student in neuroscience, Hayley Shanks’ research focuses on analyzing clinical trial results of a drug that aims to help Alzheimer's patients by targeting the disease in its early-to-mild stages. These stages are critical since substantial damage to the brain has already occurred before Alzheimer’s symptoms begin to show.

New online study explores link between healthy brains and bodies
January 15, 2024
So little is understood about the dialogue between the body and the brain. It might seem obvious that our physical state can affect our ability to think, but there are many fundamental questions neuroscientists would still like to answer—with your help. “What we hope to do is to establish definitively whether exercise is beneficial for cognition function, and if so, which cognitive functions benefit most,” said Owen, professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging in the Departments of Physiology & Pharmacology and Psychology at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. “We will also look at how this may vary across the lifespan. If exercise is good for your brain, does it confer the same benefits in the old and the young?”