Grant: DRA : Canada Graduate Research Scholarship - Doctoral Program (CGRS D)

Messages from your brain that tell your body when and how to move travel through your spinal cord and nerves that run along your limbs and connect to your muscles. These messages are blocked when the spinal cord becomes damaged, which means they can no longer reach the muscles that control your body. Without these signals, the muscles grow weak or they can completely stop working, leaving the arms or legs unable to move. Doctors can see how badly the spinal cord is hurt, but they struggle to quickly tell if the nerves that connect to the muscles are also damaged. This is a big problem because if these nerves are damaged, your muscles start to shrink and become stiff. To make things worse, this can happen in just a few months and becomes permanent in just over a year, which may stop some treatments from working properly or at all. Sadly, this means people completely lose their chance to ever move again. My research will create simple ways for doctors to find out early if the nerves going to the muscles are damaged. First, I will use special images to measure how badly the spinal cord is damaged and see if that damage also affects the nerves that control your muscles. Second, I will test whether muscles that can't move shrink or become stiff simply because they aren't being used, or if it's because the nerve that keeps them healthy has died, and has therefore lost the connection to it. In most people, when messages between the brain and the muscle become disturbed, their muscles can become stiff or sometimes move when the person does not want them to. So for the final part, I want to understand how healthy their nerves are and compare that to people whose muscles do not become stiff or move when they do not want them to. The goal of my work is to help doctors make faster and better decisions so people with damage to the spinal cord have the best chance of keeping their muscles healthy and ready for treatments that can improve their ability to move.