In Canada, mental health and substance use (MHSU) disorders affect 25 percent of young people aged 12 to 24 years. Foundry is an organization in British Columbia (BC) made up of a number of centres across the province that offer a variety of services to young people with MHSU disorders. A service not yet offered is physical activity, which can be used to manage mental and physical health. An ideal time to help people develop healthy habits, including being physically active, is while they are still teenagers or young adults.
This study will explore how physical activity programming can be included as a service offered through Foundry centres. This will be done by using photographs to understand youth needs; development of a working group to consider how to add a service; and, co-creation of a physical activity program. This work will be done collaboratively with diverse youth, service providers, and researchers. The long-term goal is to improve the quality of care, and the health of young people with MHSU disorders living in BC, Canada and across the world.
The electrical rhythms underlying heart and brain function are sustained by proteins that form pores in cellular membranes that flux ions like calcium and sodium. These pores are anchored in place by a molecule called ankyrin-B (ANKB). We discovered a genetic change in the Gitxsan Nation of Norther BC that results in a version of ANKB (ANKB p.S646F) associated with heart defects at birth, arrhythmias, sudden death, seizures, and cerebral aneurysms. We showed that this version of the ANKB molecule is mishandled by immature heart cells; however, we do not fully understand how this ANKB version contributes to clinical manifestations. As a clinician-scientist and expert in microscopy-based measurement of cellular excitability, I am well-positioned to bridge this important knowledge gap. By imaging calcium and voltage changes in living cells, I will study the impact of partial loss of ANKB and expression of disease-associated ANKB p.S646F versions on heart and brain cell excitability. I will also compare heart cell excitability data with patient electrocardiograms to help understand the connections between fundamental laboratory and clinical observations.
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI; e.g. concussion) results in a range of symptoms that disrupt daily life, and many mTBI patients go on to suffer persistent post-concussion symptoms (PPCS) that last for months to years. There are no reliable biomarkers for mTBI and PPCS, or interventions known to improve recovery.
This project will therefore assess the use of blood biomarkers as diagnostic and prognostic methods for mTBI and PPCS, and also investigate whether exercise intervention early after mTBI improves recovery. This project will also examine a grossly understudied cause of brain injury — intimate partner violence (IPV). Despite evidence of mTBI in approximately 90 percent of IPV survivors, the nature of this brain damage and how it contributes to their lived experience is poorly understood. Therefore, another goal of this project is to investigate the neurological health and a range biomarkers reflective of brain injury in women with a history of IPV.
In partnership with knowledge users (e.g. clinicians, nurses, patients, scientists), the findings from this project will facilitate the development of evidence-based interventions, education programs, and changes in practice and policy that improve the care of those who have suffered mTBIs.
Over 380,000 Canadian couples become pregnant each year. Of these, 20-68 percent of mothers and 22-45 percent of partners will experience distressing sexual health problems (e.g. low sexual desire, pain) that begin in pregnancy and that may continue up to 12-months postpartum. In turn, poor sexual health has many known consequences for overall health and well-being and is linked with increased use of health services. Yet, most new parents receive no information about sexual health during this period, in part, due to limited knowledge about who is most at risk and a lack of evidence-based interventions to address perinatal sexual health problems. Using a variety of research methods we will:
- Identify factors associated with who is most likely to experience perinatal sexual health problems.
- Use these factors to pilot a novel couples-based psychological intervention to improve sexual health.
In addition to benefits for couples’ sexual health, this research will also enhance couples’ general well-being, by reducing the psychological and relational burdens during an already vulnerable period. This knowledge will be shared with perinatal healthcare providers in order to improve perinatal healthcare practices.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia and a leading cause of death in Canada. Unfortunately, there are currently limited treatments available for this devastating disease. Recently sleep has been shown to regulate important aspects of Alzheimer’s disease pathology and is emerging as a promising target for novel interventions to prevent and slow disease progression.
To identify how changes in sleep and the body’s biological clock contribute to the cognitive deficits associated with Alzheimer’s disease, we will conduct a combination of preclinical experiments to evaluate causal mechanisms and clinical studies to evaluate the same processes in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The ultimate goal is to determine whether treating specific aspects of sleep disruption is an effective therapy for Alzheimer’s disease, which will help identify new treatments to prevent the progressive memory loss, improve the health and quality of life of patients and their families, and reduce the economic burden of the disease.
Physical activity is a cornerstone of health and wellbeing for all children. This includes children who live with chronic conditions such as congenital heart disease and diabetes. Oftentimes, these children and their families have unanswered questions regarding the safety and importance of physical activity participation. This is partly because physical activity is not regularly discussed during clinical appointments with specialist doctors, as other clinical topics take priority.
In my research, I will work with children who live with chronic conditions, and their families, to better understand their physical activity behaviours and reasons for them. I will also work with clinical care providers to learn about their current practices and attitudes around physical activity promotion. I will then bring everybody together to develop and implement new approaches that can help children with chronic conditions to lead more active lives.
We experience hunger so we eat, thirst so we drink, tiredness so we sleep, and loneliness so we find social connection. Social needs are fundamental to humans and when we are lonely the body’s central stress response system is dysregulated. As a result, our capacity to manage stress, inflammation, and energy reserves is reduced. The end result: lonely people live shorter and sicker lives.
In the wake of COVID-19, which itself manifested in an era of already increasing social isolation, it has never been more important to study loneliness. Yet, while a robust literature base has examined loneliness in older adults, we still know very little about what we can do to respond to experiences of loneliness across the life-course. This is particularly true in marginalized populations, such as gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM), who are especially vulnerable to social exclusion and related stressors, but they also exhibit unique coping strategies that may buffer these effects.
My research will help us better understand the epidemiology of loneliness among gbMSM in order to prevent its deleterious effects on these individuals, their communities, and the broader population in the wake of COVID-19.
Primary care is the foundation of strong health systems, ensuring people stay healthy and get care when needed. However, timely access to high-quality primary care is an ongoing problem in British Columbia and other provinces.
My program of research aims to ensure that all British Columbians can access quality primary care how and when they need it. The central project I lead uses information from interviews with health professionals (physicians, nurse practitioners and nurses) and patients; data from the health system; and provincial policy documents to study access to, experiences with, and outcomes from virtual primary care. Complementary research will inform modernization of the primary care workforce and informing ideal deployment of providers in team-based models in the context of COVID-19 and beyond. Finally, I lead work about implementation of “learning health systems” to support continuous improvement and innovation in primary care and across the health system more broadly.
My work follows an integrated knowledge translation model; I work with a team of researchers, policy makers, clinicians and patient partners to co-produce knowledge and address important and relevant questions that are driven by their combined input.
Tumors of the same cell type, origin, and stage have unique genetic features that impact course of disease and treatment response. However, management of cancer is still largely dictated by a patient’s tumor cell type and stage without further refinement.
We intend to take advantage of the unique opportunities afforded by BC’s cancer care system (with a single payer system and uniform treatment protocols, together with high quality patient outcome data) to build an artificial intelligence (AI)-based cancer biomarker discovery platform. The proposed platform will integrate the images of the tumor tissues along with their genetic markers through AI to identify novel biomarkers for cancer patient risk stratification and management. Our program will:
- Improve efficiency in pathology laboratories.
- Identify tissue image features that correlate with tumor genetics which can rapidly and accurately classify patients into clinically relevant groups.
- Generate new biomarkers for precision medicine by combining tumor genetics and tissue imaging.
Ultimately, this program will improve patient outcomes, alleviate the need to perform expensive genetic profiling tests, and lead to significant cost-savings in the healthcare system.
Mitochondria are factories in our cells that produce energy and building blocks. Constant delivery of proteins, the factory “workers”, to mitochondria from other parts of the cell is important for proper function of these factories. Defects in delivery occurs in many diseases, including diseases involving nerve cell death (neurodegenerative) like Alzheimer’s. It is thus extremely important and timely to gain more knowledge on how cell health is maintained when protein delivery into mitochondria is damaged.
I discovered a new mechanism, the mitochondrial compromised protein import response (mitoCPR), which protects mitochondria and cells when protein delivery is damaged. I showed that such damage leads to proteins getting stuck and clogging entry sites into mitochondria. My research aims to gain a deeper understanding of how the mitoCPR unclogs mitochondria entry sites and helps them recover under disease and physiological conditions. Using molecular biology and advanced technologies such as gene editing, proteomics, and microscopy, my lab will reveal how the cell keeps mitochondria healthy. This research may uncover new treatment strategies for neurodegenerative and other diseases, caused by improper mitochondrial function.
