Author: researchcanada (Research Canada)

With the rise of social media and mommy bloggers, many new moms experience feelings of failure thinking that everyone else in the world is doing great and they are the only ones who are struggling. Dr. Simone Vigod, chief of psychiatry at Women’s College Hospital and scientist at Women’s College Research Institute is leveraging digital technologies to transform mental healthcare for mothers.

With the discovery of the genes linked to hereditary breast cancer, there was an urgent need for healthcare providers to also understand the clinical implications of a positive mutation diagnosis. The Familial Breast Cancer Research Unit at Women’s College Hospital is working to help prevent hereditary cancer from developing, diagnosing it early and treating it more effectively.

Addressing the opioid issue is complex, and requires multiple strategies, but an important component is more judicious prescribing in the acute pain setting. In London, Ontario, two hospitals joined forces to tackle this issue by creating an Opioid Stewardship Council that has initiated several key strategies intended to change prescribing behaviour within both organizations.

Long lags in the testing of street drugs and the heightened risk of overdoses and deaths among users exposed to tainted drugs amid North America’s unprecedented opioid crisis are the target of a groundbreaking partnership between researchers at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa that is piloting the use of a portable mass spectrometer to test drug samples at an Ottawa supervised injection site.