Category: News

Overeating is the largest determinant of obesity, which is one of the biggest health crises affecting Canadians. A new animal study out of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine provides new insight into how high fat diets rapidly rewire the reward circuits in the brain, which can lead to an increase in food-seeking and risk-taking behaviours in the pursuit of food. The study will be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States on February 15th. Continue reading →

A new book by Robert B. Campenot, Professor Emeritus at University of Alberta offers a comprehensive overview of animal electricity, examining its physiological mechanisms as well as the experimental discoveries that form the basis for our modern understanding of nervous systems across the animal kingdom. Learn more about this book, and others, in our neuroscience books section!

Research from Roger Thompson’s laboratory, at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, shows new therapeutic could protect the brain and lead to better stroke outcomes.

The discovery of a new signaling pathway in neurons could help researchers understand how to protect the brain during a stroke. Researchers have long thought that a protein called the NMDA receptor was principally responsible for neuron death during a stroke, but the new animal study shows that it is, in fact, the interaction between NMDA receptors and another protein known as pannexin-1, that causes the neurons to die. The discovery was made at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, and published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Continue reading →

The discovery by a team at the Institut de Recherche Clinique de Montréal (IRCM) could contribute to the development of cell therapies and more targeted treatments against cancer

A study conducted by a research team led by Michel Cayouette, Full IRCM Research Professor and Director of the Cellular Neurobiology research unit, in collaboration with a team led by Stéphane Angers, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, makes the cover of the latest edition of Developmental Cell following the discovery of a mechanism enabling the production of cellular diversity in the developing nervous system. Continue reading →

Research also demonstrates brain’s plasticity and ability to adapt to new language environments

You may believe that you have forgotten the Chinese you spoke as a child, but your brain hasn’t. Moreover, that “forgotten” first language may well influence what goes on in your brain when you speak English or French today.

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute describe their discovery that even brief, early exposure to a language influences how the brain processes sounds from a second language later in life. Even when the first language learned is no longer spoken. Continue reading →

New research finds that light therapy can treat non-seasonal depression and improve the overall wellbeing of people suffering from the disease.

“These results are very exciting because light therapy is inexpensive, easy to access and use, and comes with few side effects,” said Dr. Raymond Lam, a UBC professor and psychiatrist at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, a partnership between UBC and Vancouver Coastal Health. “Patients can easily use light therapy along with other treatments such as antidepressants and psychotherapy.” Continue reading →

A new study led by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University and the MUHC, gets closer to identifying the mechanisms responsible for multiple sclerosis and makes headway in the search for better treatments.

Modern scientific understanding has considered multiple sclerosis (MS) to be a disease controlled by the T cell, a type of white blood cell. Research has shown that in MS, T cells inappropriately attack myelin, the protective layer of fat covering nerves in the central nervous system, exposing them to damage. Continue reading →

Discovery advances our understanding of how our brain controls body hydration and temperature
Scientists at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and Duke University have made a breakthrough that advances our understanding of how the brain detects and prevents dehydration.
They have identified the structure of a key protein located in the brain, which is involved in body hydration and that could control temperature. Continue reading →

New research conducted in the laboratory of Louis-Éric Trudeau at the Université de Montréal helps explain why some neurons in the brain are specifically affected and die in Parkinson’s disease. His team found that the death of neurons affected by Parkinson’s, including some found in regions called the substantia nigra (literally “the black substance”), the locus ceruleus and the dorsal nucleus of the vagus nerve, may be caused by a form of cellular energy crisis in neurons that require unusually high quantities of energy to carry out their job of regulating movement. Continue reading →

A new study by Karl Fernandes, a researcher at the CRCHUM and a professor at Université de Montréal linking abnormal fast deposits in the brain and the development of Alzheimer’s disease.   “We found fatty acid deposits in the brain of patients who died from the disease and in mice that were genetically modified to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Our experiments suggest that these abnormal fat deposits could be a trigger for the disease”, said Karl Fernandes. Continue reading →