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

Tongue cancer affects 5% of Canadians per year. The tongue is essential for speech and eating. Treatments for tongue cancer may be devastating to these everyday aspects of life and patients may have difficulty participating in work and social activities. One treatment for tongue cancer is to surgically remove the cancerous tissue and replace it with skin from the forearm. Changes in speech and eating after this kind of surgery are starting to be understood by researchers. But, little is known about what happens in the brain when a portion of the tongue is replaced with forearm tissue. We suspect that the wiring in the brain that is related to sensation and movement of the tongue reorganizes so that it can understand the changes to the tongue. We also do not understand if changes that occur in the brain will represent changes in patient's tongue sensation, tongue mobility, speech production and quality of life. Even less is known about the best time to provide speech therapy to tongue cancer patients and what happens in the brain when we do speech therapy. We know from research studying amputees that the brain reorganizes itself, so an area of the brain that once controlled the absent arm or leg, now controls other areas of the body. We know that intensive speech therapy can change the structure and function of the brain as this has been studied in Parkinson's disease. By using tests to image the brain (fMRI and DTI), we hope to see changes in the brain that relate to changes in sensation, movement, speech and quality of life. We also hope that the changes we see in the brain will help us determine the best time to provide speech therapy. Patients will receive speech therapy and we hope to see changes in the brain related to therapy, as well as better sensation, movement, speech and quality of life. With a better understanding of changes that occur in the brain after surgery for tongue cancer, health care teams will be able to provide better care to these patients