ubcmetricsneuro-blog

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Dr. Oscar BenaventeVCH Research Institute is pleased to announce Dr. Oscar Benavente has joined VCH/UBC Faculty of Medicine, Division of Neurology, as Research Director of the Stroke and Cerebrovascular Health Program. Dr. Benavente's recruitment significantly enhances the area of acute and chronic stroke research at VCH and UBC. Recruited from the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio, he brings with him a large, $63 million Clinical Trial (funded by NIH) aimed at identifying new measures to prevent small subcortical strokes, a type of stroke that occurs when a blood vessel bringing blood deep into the brain and becomes blocked. About 150,000 Americans and 20,000 Canadians have this type of stroke every year, and although it is not usually fatal, recurrence is extremely high and it predisposes patients to dementia. High blood pressure is the main cause of subcortical strokes, but it has not been known how aggressively it should be managed. The goal of this study, entitled Secondary Prevention of Small Subcortical Strokes (SPS3) is to identify an optimal combination of blood pressure control and anti-clotting therapy that will prevent both recurrent strokes and cognitive decline. SPS3 is the first study of its kind in the world. It was initiated as a pilot project in 1998 and is now a Phase III clinical trial with 61 participating sites in 8 countries - Canada, United States, México, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador and Spain. SPS3 is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Neurological Disorders. VCH is a party in this Trial and VCH Research Institute recently signed 59 of the 61 site agreements. This study already includes 2500 patients and is aiming to recruit a total of 3000 patients with a completion date of April 2012. Bio: Dr. Benavente received his medical degree from the University of Cordoba, Argentina. He completed residency and fellowship training at the Universities of Western Ontario and Ottawa, as well as the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, where he was the Director of the Stroke Program. He has published over 40 papers and participated in numerous clinical trials for prevention and treatment of acute stroke.

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An international team led by a neurologist at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health has shown that a combination of aspirin and clopidogrel, both common blood thinners, does not prevent recurrence of a common type of stroke, and may even pose serious risks.

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Dr. Ian Mackenzie, neuropathologist at Vancouver General Hospital and professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC is part of a North American team of researchers who found a genetic abnormality they believe to be the cause of two major neurodegenerative diseases: FTD (frontotemporal dementia) and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).

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An international team led by human genetic researchers at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health has identified the latest gene associated with typical late-onset Lewy body Parkinson’s disease (PD), with the help of a Canadian Mennonite family of Dutch-German-Russian ancestry.

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 Listening to music can evoke powerful emotional responses and affect the mood of the listener.  We can easily recognize familiar music from the first few notes and familiar melodies often bring back memories of specific places or events.  Yet the brain regions that are involved in recognizing familiar music pieces are still not well understood.  Dr. Naznin Virji-Babul and her colleagues (A. Moiseev, DSRF) and M. Huotilainen (University of Helsinki) and UBC students (N. Moiseeva, T. Feng) are studying the brain mechanisms involved in the perception of familiar and unfamiliar music.  Recently they have started a study to look at how the brain responds to a familiar tune – in this case, the popular  Mamma mia and a less well known melody by Bach (Musette) in young adults. Subjects who were familiar with the tune listened to the instrumental version and sang along with the tune and/or clapped their hands prior to having a brain scan.  Listening to Mamma mia (see animation below) to in comparison to Musette, led to earlier activations in the auditory regions of the brain  and in the perceptual and emotion processing areas.   Interestingly, this melody also elicited stronger activations in the motor areas of the brain.  These results suggests that listening to familiar melodies not only leads to activation in a large network of areas that are involved in auditory perception and emotional processing but that musical memories are tightly coupled with action (such as singing or dancing).          The coupling between perception and action has received much interest in cognitive neuroscience since the discovery of mirror neurons.  First discovered by Rizzolatti, mirror neurons fire both when a person acts and when the person observes another performing the same action.  For example, reaching for a cup of coffee  will activate a network of areas including percpetual and motor related regions when simply watching someone else reaching for a cup of coffee. These results add to this body of work showing that when music is paired with motion such as singing, clapping or dancing, simply listening to that same piece of music will activate the same motion related areas. These results have important implications for the use of music intervention for people with perceptual-motor impairments such as in Stroke, Parkinson’s diease, Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome.

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CBC's Frederic Zalac investigates research into the potential of enhancing the neuroplasticity of the brain - the ability of the brain to change

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Multiple sclerosis patients appear to have a lower cancer risk.

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Gavin Stuart, UBC’s Vice Provost Health and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, signed the agreement in Beijing.

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Today’s idea: Westerners see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of humanity, a psychological study finds. In other words, its authors say, we do not know what we thought we knew about the human mind.

Psychology | In The National Post, Adam McDowell reports on research led by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia finding that the Western mind differs in fundamental ways from others.

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Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based

on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often

implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as

representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative

database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across

populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The

domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral

reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of

WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about

humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and

behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on

sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing

questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close

by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Keywords: behavioral economics; cross-cultural research; cultural psychology; culture; evolutionary psychology; experiments; external

validity; generalizability; human universals; population variability

Joseph Henrich

Department of Psychology and Department of Economics, University of British

Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z4, Canada

joseph.henrich@gmail.com

http://www.psych.ubc.ca/henrich/home.html

Steven J. Heine

Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

V6T 1Z4, Canada

heine@psych.ubc.ca

Ara Norenzayan

Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

V6T 1Z4, Canada

ara@psych.ubc.ca

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2013 UBC 3MT Three Minute Thesis People's Choice Sun Nee TAN

Sun-Nee Tan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. Presentation Title: Musical Walking Program for Parkinson's Patients

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After staring into the eyes of schizophrenia patients, a University of B.C. researcher says she may be on the path to eventually finding new ways to treat the mental illness through using a simple video game. “There is a lot of potential,” said lead author Miriam Spering, an assistant professor in the department of ophthalmology and visual sciences. “I think we are some years away from actually making this a standard therapy, but it could become a tool.”

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Alzheimer's disease in Canada and China - Dr. Weihong Song 

  Alzheimer's disease affects ten per cent of people over 65 years old, and 50 per cent of people over 85. Both China and Canada are experiencing a rapidly aging population. In China, there are 178 million people over 60. Dr. Weihong Song's research focuses on finding the cause of Alzheimer's disease and developing effective ways to prevent and treat it. In 2011, he was awarded the Friendship Award, the highest award offered by the Chinese government to a foreign expert, for his contributions in forging innovative China-Canada collaborations on Alzheimer's research and education.  Dr. Song helped establish the China-Canada Joint Health Research Initiative. Managed and funded annually by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), it has supported 89 joint research projects in the first five years. And it has just been extended for five more years. In the interview Dr. Song describes the efforts to cure and care for Alzheimer's patients and assesses the challenges and rewards of Sino-Canadian collaboration. Learn more about Asia Pacific Memo, by the Institute of Asian Research, at www.asiapacificmemo.ca/about

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Donald Calne

Wikipedia entry

Born in London, England, he received his Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Medicine degrees from the University of Oxford.[4] He worked in England and at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland until 1980.[5] From 1981 to 2001, he was the Director of the Neurodegenerative Disorders Centre at the University of British Columbia and a professor of neurology.[4] He is a member of the National Parkinson Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board.[4][6][7]

In 1998, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2001, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.[8][9] In 2002, he received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of British Columbia.[5] He was a member of the Steering Committee of the 1st World Parkinson Congress (WPC) in 2006.[10]

He was the first researcher to use L dopa in the UK and the first to show how to use synthetic dopamine to treat Parkinson's disease. He has shown that latent damage occurs in the brain even before the symptoms of Parkinson's disease appears.[5][11][12]

In 1999, he published the book, Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior.[13][14][15][16][17]

He married with Susan M. Wigfield who a nurse and co-ordinator at the UBC hospital’s movement disorders clinic . They worked with people with Parkinson's disease together for 25 years time.[18][19][20][21]

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Djavad Mowafaghian donates $2 million to Vancouver General Hospital for its Stroke program.

Stroke neurologists from Vancouver General Hospital 's province wide stroke program explain the challenges they face in trying to minimize the impact of a stroke, condition in which there is a sudden loss of brain function caused by interrupted blood flow in the brain. Featured stroke neurologists; Dr Samuel Yip . Dr Oscar Benavente . Dr Negar Asdaghi. The video was shown at an event announcing a $2 million gift to the stroke program at VGH made by the Djavad Mowafaghian foundation . For more information or to make a gift visithttp://www.worldclasshealthcare.ca

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UBC start an evolution - Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health to Advance Cures for Brain Disorders

Philanthropist Djavad Mowafaghian was one of those people affected by a brain disorder. He suffered a stroke, and although he fully recovered, was deeply affected by the experience. His ensuing $15 million donation to UBC's Faculty of Medicine will go directly toward the study of brain health. "The brain has been referred to as the last frontier of medicine," said Mowafaghian. "I hope that my gift will enable doctors and researchers to reach that frontier." Slated to open in 2013, the Centre for Brain Health will integrate brain research and patient care. "It will be the British Columbia headquarters for serious brain disease," says Dr. Cynader. "It will be a facility that brings together researchers, neurologists, psychiatrists and patients, who will come here for world-class help."

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Prof Janet Werker, Psychology

Psychology professor and Canada Research Chair at UBC, Janet Werker has conducted extensive research on infant language learning. She directs the Infant Studies Centre. Werker's over 100 papers and chapters have appeared in journals such as Science, Nature, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Sciences, and Cognition. Some of her awards include the Killam Research Prize, UBC Alumni Prize in the Social Sciences, the Jacob Bieley Prize (UBC's premier research prize), and Fellowships in the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Psychological Association, The American Psychological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Werker's research has been reported on by UBC public affairs and she was featured on the cover of UBC's 07/08 Year in Headlines.