Personalizing Alzheimer's care: SFU researchers partner with BC Generations Project to help people with dementia

Dementia debilitates one’s life and its seriousness cannot be overstated. Yet understanding how best to prevent dementia continues to elude researchers dedicated to solving the problem.

The challenge lies in a lack of understanding of the complex interplay of genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors that impact the onset, progression and symptoms of dementia. To meet this challenge, celebrated researcher Brianne Kent assembled a cross-faculty, multi-institutional team, bringing together intellect from multiple perspectives.

Together, under the name Brain Resilience Study, the team was awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) grant of $750,000 for their project, “Multiscale dynamical system modelling to understand resilience in brain aging and dementia.”

Funding such as this is needed to build upon existing work and advance new approaches to help the hundreds of thousands of Canadians* who deal with some form of dementia, their families, and their support networks. Funding the Brain Resilience Study will help find preventative techniques and personalized coping methods to ideally decrease the number of those affected by dementia.

The team considers the brain's resilience a holistic concept in their CIHR-funded work. They hope that by understanding why dementia affects some people more than others and why some people seem to have more resilient brains, they can reduce the risks of dementia and design personalized interventions to slow the spread of the disease for people who develop it.

One of the hypotheses centres on sleep. It’s no secret that good sleep begets good health. Not only do you feel better after a good night’s sleep, but your body also doesn’t feel sluggish and your mind feels sharp. There are countless other benefits you don’t necessarily see or feel. One is your brain’s health. A well-rested brain is a healthy and happy brain, where everything is firing correctly.

Can good sleep strengthen your brain to resist dementia?

This is what the Brain Resilience Study is going to pursue. The team’s goal is to understand the biological and social factors that make a person resilient to dementia.

The team’s CIHR award connects them with the BC Generations Project (BCGP). Operating for over 15 years, BCGP has been collecting information from 30,000 participants throughout the province. Having access to this data will instantly catapult the Brain Resilience Study team’s research several stages.

Currently, in the beginning stages of assessing the existing data and connecting with 1,300 of the BCGP’s existing participants, the CIHR funding gives the team three years to make as much progress as possible. This includes collecting new neuroimaging, cognitive, and genetic data to create a dataset tailored for understanding both the biological and social factors that influence resilience to dementia.

To generate accurate, real-life data, the researchers will monitor participants sleeping in the participants’ homes. All participants will have the electrical activity of their brain measured via an electroencephalogram (EEG). Some participants will also undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) at SFU ImageTech. High resolution neuroimaging and circadian rhythm assessments will be made with a subset of the participants thanks to additional funding from the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada.

SFU is the North American Hub for The Virtual Brain, a powerful tool for creating brain models tailored to the individual. The Brain Resilience Team will create models to help predict patterns that predict good brain health, identify risk, and simulate potential interventions. 

People with dementia can have vastly different symptoms and progression. The Brain Resilience Study’s combination of technology, access to participants and data, and the brilliance and experience of its team hold great promise for understanding the causes and ways to reduce the risks of developing dementia as we age. 

Kent hopes that the team’s work will attract the support necessary to monitor, test, and assess their group for the next 30 years. “We would love to find community sponsors, donors, or an organization that wants to help us develop the most comprehensive study of brain resilience,” she says.

What’s next?

“We are planning events to engage with the community,” Kent says. “We hope to gain insights about what they think contributes to resilience, as well as share our research updates with them.” Look for invitations to these events in the coming months.

Making a difference for B.C. is a priority for Simon Fraser University. With the ambitions of the Brain Resilience Study dream team, we anticipate seeing life-changing benefits for people throughout the province and the country.