Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Blood vessels carry oxygen and nutrients to support organs throughout the body, a process that is especially important in the brain but is impaired during aging and in many people with Alzheimer's disease (AD). AD is the most common form of dementia in the elderly affecting an estimated 750 000 Canadians. Despite the high number of people affected by AD, no treatment is available and the causes are not fully understood. One theory explaining how people develop AD is that changes to blood vessel health in the brain impairs the delivery of oxygen to brain cells and eventually causes the cells to die. We believe that high density lipoproteins (HDL), the "good cholesterol", are vital to the health of the blood vessels in the brain as they have been seen to keep the cells within blood vessels in other parts of the body healthy. This idea is further supported by several studies that show people with lower levels of HDL are more likely to develop dementia. The proposed research aims to learn if HDL can help treat or prevent AD. First, a mouse model will be used to determine if increased HDL levels are a part of the known beneficial effects from an existing drug. Next, we will develop new ways to measure HDL function in the brain. Finally, we will move our research into human clinical samples. In these experiments we will determine if HDL function is altered in people with AD and if the AD genetic risk factor APOE4, which also affects brain blood vessel health, is accompanied by changes in HDL function or levels. This work will inform researchers if HDL is a good therapeutic target for AD or a marker of future disease development. It is now a crucial time to develop ways to treat people with AD as our aging population will result in a doubling in the number of Canadians affected by dementia if nothing is done, a burden which Canadian families, the healthcare system, and the economy simply cannot handle.