Grant: Heart and Stroke National New Investigator Seed Catalyst Grant

Stroke affects an increasingly large number of individuals in Canada and around the world. Brain damage as a result of stroke can often lead to difficulties in mobility, language production and understanding, and other functions such as memory and reasoning. Though these difficulties lead to serious reductions in quality of life, we still do not know how damage in one location of the brain is related to specific difficulties. This is in part because we do not yet fully understand how the brain is connected and how its connections support our everyday behaviours. Brain damage is typically described based on its location and size, but this completely ignores how the damage may have interrupted some connections between different regions of the brain. For example, damage to the front of the brain will result in different functional deficits depending exactly where it is: if it is more towards the top the patient may experience difficulties with memory (e.g., phone numbers) but if it is lower the patient may experience emotional issues (e.g., understanding facial expressions). We have a fairly good idea of what the processing regions of the brain do (grey matter, made up of cells that do the “thinking”) but we know very little about how they are connected through the white matter of the brain (i.e., the “wires” that connect different processing regions together). Without this knowledge, damage to the “wires” is difficult to predict the effects of or, ultimately, treat with clinical intervention.