The purpose of this research study is to gather perspectives on the Black experience at the CSM and on Black health outcomes. These perspectives will be used to understand priorities for change at the CSM, both in the short term and in the long term, and towards the development of the CSM’s first Black Health and Excellence Strategic Plan (BHESP).

We are interested in better understanding pain in patients with knee osteoarthritis. We will study both the joint and the brain with magnetic resonance imaging (one scan of the knee, one scan of the brain). This will enable us to better describe joint degeneration and how it is related to pain as well as how the brain changes with chronic pain due to knee osteoarthritis. We will further examine pain and sensory processing with tactile (touch) stimuli. To best understand these changes in patients, we also need healthy, pain-free, arthritis-free control participants.

This study involves MRI scans from healthy children and adults to develop and evaluate new MRI methods. As part of this study we will acquire a few variants of MR images to evaluate brain skull shapes and MR characteristics with age, gender, and background.

Children who are born very early are more likely to experience some challenges with behavior and mental health. However, we don’t yet understand why. The purpose of this study is to take measurements of the brain’s structure and function in children born very preterm or very low birthweight. We want to compare brain networks to full-term born participants. We want to try to find features of those networks that might increase risk in brain development.

We are investigating if biosensor can accurately measure blood biomarkers of concussion. Concussion diagnoses and prognoses are currently reliant on subjective measures. A biosensor that can objectively measure concussion could supplement subjective measures. This would allow early diagnosis or recovery monitoring to reduce recovery times. All participants in this study will complete initial visit measures upon enrolment. These include questionnaires (15 minutes) and a blood draw (5 minutes). Participants with concussion will return for follow-up visits at 2, 6, and 12 weeks after injury or until recovery. They will also complete a daily online symptom survey (2 minutes), and be given access to concussion education resources. Participants with a muscular or skeletal injury will only complete initial visit measures.

This study will implement the iCARE-PD model which consists of an approach by health providers, to support patients through the challenges of their disease and facilitate their access to health resources in the community. The iCARE-PD promotes self-management skills (i.e. e.g. to improve swallowing and speech by joining speech therapy sessions and doing vocal exercises at home, to improve balance by joining a exercises group or a fall prevention clinic) that will simplify the use of available specialized services with little increase in resources and cost. To provide more effective integration of care, technology will be explored to share health information using electronically delivered study questionnaires.

CGRP monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have been effective for many migraine patients who previously failed the standard treatments. The purpose of this research study is to assess early results of all four currently available CGRP mAbs (fremanezumab, galcanezumab, erenumab and eptinezumab), with the focus on their tolerability and safety. Also, this study will try to answer the important question of whether non-responders to treatment with one of the CGRP mAbs benefit from switch to another other Ab or not.

This study aims to evaluate effectiveness in adult migraine patients who have initiated eptinezumab according to the local prescribing information, as well as the treatment patterns and health care resource utilisation (HCRU) in clinical practice.

Our study at the Foothills Hospital aims to understand changes in the immune system and inflammation that may be responsible for cognitive decline after a stroke. We are recruiting control participants for this study. We will collect blood samples, brain imaging, and cognitive testing. The time commitment is 2 hours every year for 4 years.

To help improve the ability to detect dementia before symptoms develop and thereby increase access to early treatment. The study purposes are to improve diagnosis of dementia and help measure effectiveness of future treatments. The specific aims are to identify the earliest features of dementia before symptoms can be detected and to understand how they progress over a period of several years. Without your help, it would be impossible to determine if the values seen in patients with transient ischemic attack are part of the normal variability between individuals or not.