Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

A large initiative in Canadian health research at present is to develop tools that identify the early stages of neurodegenerative disease. This quest has been facilitated by the discovery that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behaviour disorder is a significant early sign of a class of neurodegenerative diseases. People with REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) do not have enough muscle paralysis during REM sleep, which causes them to "act out" their dreams at night. More than 80% of these individuals go on to develop Parkinson's disease or a related neurodegenerative disease, such as Lewy body dementia. The neurotransmitter acetylcholine plays a role in REM sleep and in these neurodegenerative diseases, but it has not yet been sufficiently examined in people with RBD. Seeking to better understand this question, my doctoral project will look into the role of acetylcholine in RBD using a novel compound for PET imaging called 18F-FEOBV, which our laboratory has been developing over the last 15 years. This compound enables researchers to study acetylcholine systems in the brain in a more precise manner than the existing PET compounds. I will recruit thirty participants from the Montreal RBD study at the Sacré-Coeur Hospital and will guide them through an MRI scan and a PET scan using 18F-FEOBV at the Montreal Neurological Institute. The participants will also undergo a sleep recording, cognitive testing, and a neurological examination. My hypothesis is that the RBD individuals will show acetylcholine-related abnormalities in the brain, whereas the controls will not. Additionally, I expect to see a relationship between these abnormalities and muscle activity during REM sleep, lower cognitive scores, and other early signs of neurodegeneration. My ultimate goal in this project is, with the help of 18F-FEOBV, to shed light on the mechanisms involved in RBD, and in so doing, in the early stages of certain neurodegenerative diseases.