Grant: Foundation Grant

Dementia is a syndrome that affects your memory, thinking, and behavior, resulting in significant burden to your family, friends, and overall, the Canadian health-care system. In addition to Alzheimer's disease, there are many causes of dementia, which are often overlapping, complex, and multi-faceted. In contrast to many research studies that only look at a single disease, the Sunnybrook Dementia Study was created to study the real-world of patients that come to our clinic with a variety of complicated, difficult to diagnose, comorbid dementias such as vascular cognitive impairment, Parkinson's Lewy Body disease, and frontotemporal dementia, to name a few. Recognizing that each patient is different from the next, our personalized approach to the urgent challenge of dementia treatment embeds our research into clinical care. Continuing with the clinical, neuropsychological, MRI, and genetic assessments, our future research will use the knowledge we have acquired to expand our research to a larger scale, and will include more assessment tools such as PET imaging, blood-based biomarkers, and autopsy info. Leaving no stone unturned, our personalized approach will also examine new avenues for dementia treatment, such as the re-purposing of blood pressuring lowering drugs for delaying dementia and cognitive decline, the role of sleep problems in clearing brain waste products such as amyloid, and the potential use of focused ultrasound to deliver novel drug therapies to the brain. Under the direction of Dr. Sandra E. Black, a world leader in dementia research, we hope that our patient-centered research will translate into disease-modifying therapies that target dementia, the greatest looming public healthcare challenge facing society.