2.杰出研究成果介绍
研究成果一：音乐就像是抚慰野蛮的乳房一样
"soothes the savage breast"
The McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM) is an interdisciplinary group of researchers including psychologists, neuroscientists, music theorists, musicians, dancers, media artists, mathematicians, kinesiologists, health scientists, and engineers. MIMM's founding director, music psychologist Laurel Trainor, researches how music impacts our mind and bodies.Music "soothes the savage breast".Musicians perform in the LIVELab with their EEG rates recorded in the blue wall behind them.Why does a toddler instinctively rock from side to side upon hearing music? Why do we tap our feet when we hear a favorite song? Why do we go to concerts when we can listen to music at home?Music impacts our mind and our body in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. It really does “soothe the savage breast”, lowering blood pressure, reducing anxiety, helping us feel connected, even easing pain.Music psychologist Laurel Trainor is known for her groundbreaking neuroscience research on musical development in children and infants. In a 2012 study, funded by the Grammy Foundation, she found that musical training benefits children even before they can walk or talk – one-year-olds who participated in interactive music classes with their parents smiled more, communicated better and showed larger and earlier brain responses to musical tones.The founding director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind is poised to extend our knowledge further with the establishment of an $8 million performance lab that monitors in real time what happens in the brains of musicians and audiences as they interact with each other.“Until now, my research has focused on individuals. Yet one of the most important things about music is that it’s a social activity. We do it at parties, weddings, funerals, anywhere people come together to feel a common goal,” says the professor of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour.They are also more likely to help each other, Trainor’s research has shown. “We studied 14-month-olds and found that those who participated in simultaneous movement to music with an experimenter were twice as likely to help that experimenter when she ‘accidentally’ dropped a crayon compared to infants who experienced out-of-synch movement with the experimenter. It made me realize that we need to study groups of people.”The McMaster LIVE (Large Interactive Virtual Environment) Lab was funded with grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. With its grand opening in the fall of 2013, the LIVELab looks like an ordinary 100-seat concert hall, with many of its seats wired to measure audience members’ physiological responses – everything from brain activity and heart rate to breathing and perspiration.Infrared motion sensors record head movements. “We want to know if one person starts moving his head, do others start doing it as well?” says Trainor. “Do they feel affiliation with other members of the audience?”Audience members are not the only ones who are monitored. EEG recordings reveal how musicians interact when engaged in the complex task of making music together.“It’s not an easy thing at all. There’s an ongoing negotiation between musicians. Playing together requires the brain to make models to predict what other musicians are going to do, because if you wait to hear what they do it’s too late to play in synch with them.”The LIVE Lab includes a video wall to measure the cognitive and emotional impacts of media presentations and virtual acoustics capable of mimicking any space, from the very small to Carnegie Hall, to see how individuals are affected by different auditory environments.The research applications are limitless, says Trainor, from improved hearing aids to new therapies for autism. “Everyone thinks music is fun but that it doesn’t really doing anything important. But studying how the brain processes music can tell us a lot about how the motor system and the auditory system interact in general.”Trainor’s group has shown, for instance, that if they present individuals with a rhythmic pattern of evenly spaced beats, and then slow down the tempo, the brain adjusts. “Recording EEG and MEG, we were able to analyze the oscillatory activity in the brain. We found that beta oscillations decreased after every beat and increased prior to the next. The brain was predicting the next beat.”Even more interesting, she notes, is where in the brain that mental activity is occurring. “We saw activity in auditory areas, which was not surprising, but we also found it occurring in motor areas, which tells us that the two areas are in synch. They’re talking to each other.”Trainor predicts that the knowledge gained from experiments in the LIVE Lab will be transformative. “There are other virtual labs out there but they’re not equipped to study both musician variables and audience variables. This facility will provide us with rich sets of data not available anywhere else in the world.”
麦克马斯特音乐与心灵研究所(MIMM)是一个跨学科的研究团队包括心理学家、神经学家、音乐理论家、音乐家、舞蹈家、媒体艺术家、数学家、运动学家、健康科学家和工程师。MI的创始董事，音乐心理学家Laurel Trainor，研究音乐如何影响我们的思想和身体。音乐家们在LIVELab中开始了演示，他们的脑电图记录在他们身后的蓝色墙壁上。为什么一个蹒跚学步的孩子在听音乐的时候会本能地从一边到一边摇摆?当我们听到一首最喜欢的歌曲时，为什么要轻拍我们的脚呢?当我们在家听音乐的时候，我们为什么要去听音乐会呢?音乐对我们的思想和身体产生了影响，我们才刚刚开始理解。它确实能“抚慰野蛮的乳房”，降低血压，减少焦虑，帮助我们感觉联系，甚至缓解疼痛。音乐心理学家Laurel Trainor以她对儿童和婴儿音乐发展的开创性的神经科学研究而闻名。在2012年的一项由格莱美基金会资助的研究中，她发现音乐训练对孩子们甚至在他们走路或说话之前都有好处——一岁的孩子和父母一起参加互动音乐课的时候笑得更多，交流得更好，对音乐音调的反应也更大更早。麦克马斯特音乐与心智研究所的创始主任准备进一步扩展我们的知识，建立一个价值800万美元的性能实验室，实时监控音乐家和观众在他们相互交流时大脑中发生的事情。“直到现在，我的研究都集中在个人上。然而，音乐最重要的一点是，它是一种社会活动。我们在聚会、婚礼、葬礼上这样做，人们聚在一起，共同感受一个共同的目标，”心理学、神经科学和行为学教授说。Trainor的研究表明，他们也更有可能互相帮助。“我们对14个月大的婴儿进行了研究，发现那些与实验者同时进行音乐同步运动的人，当她“意外地”掉了蜡笔的时候，会帮助实验者的几率是那些与实验参与者有过同步运动的婴儿的两倍。这让我意识到我们需要学习一群人。”McMaster LIVE(大型互动虚拟环境)实验室是由加拿大创新基金会和安大略省研究与创新基金会资助的。在2013年秋季的盛大开幕典礼上，LIVELab看起来就像一个普通的100个座位的音乐厅，它的许多座位都是用来测量观众的生理反应——从大脑活动、心率到呼吸和排汗。红外运动传感器记录头部运动。“我们想知道一个人是否开始移动他的头，其他人也开始这么做了吗?””特莱诺尔说。“他们觉得和其他观众有关系吗?”观众不是唯一被监控的人。脑电图记录揭示了音乐家们在参与复杂的音乐创作的过程中是如何相互作用的。“这不是一件容易的事。音乐家之间正在进行一场持续的谈判。一起演奏需要大脑做出模型来预测其他音乐家将会做什么，因为如果你等着听他们的演奏，那就太晚了，不能和他们一起演奏。”现场实验室包括一段视频墙，用来测量媒体展示的认知和情感影响，以及模拟任何空间的虚拟声学，从很小的到卡内基音乐厅，看看个体是如何受到不同的听觉环境的影响的。Trainor说，研究的应用是无限的，从改进的助听器到治疗自闭症的新疗法。“每个人都认为音乐很有趣，但它并没有真正做任何重要的事情。但是研究大脑如何处理音乐可以告诉我们很多关于运动系统和听觉系统是如何相互作用的。”例如，Trainor的团队已经展示了，如果他们给每个人以一种有节奏的节奏，让他们有节奏的节奏，然后放慢节奏，大脑就会调整。“记录EEG和MEG，我们能够分析大脑的震荡活动。我们发现，在每一次心跳之后，测试的振荡会减弱，并且会在下一次出现之前增加。大脑在预测下一次的节奏。”更有趣的是，她指出，大脑的活动正在发生。“我们看到了听觉区域的活动，这并不奇怪，但我们也发现它发生在运动区域，这告诉我们这两个区域是同步的。他们在互相交谈。”Trainor预测，从实验室中获得的知识将是变革的。“市面上还有其他虚拟实验室，但他们没有研究音乐家变量和观众变量的能力。这个设施将为我们提供丰富的数据，而这些数据在世界其他地方都是不可用的。”
研究成果二：工程与大脑
Engineers are developing some of the most advanced technologies to reveal the workings and structure of the human brain.Mike Noseworthy (on the left) with his research team.Engineering and the brain may seem poles apart, but some of the most advanced technologies revealing the workings and structure of the human brain are being developed by engineers.McMaster’s Mike Noseworthy is one of those redefining how we see the brain, literally. An MRI physicist turned biomedical engineer, Mike heads the Imaging Research Centre at McMaster’s Brain-Body Institute, where researchers are working to advance our understanding of how the mind, brain and body work together to influence health and disease.Armed with one of the most sophisticated MRI scanners available, Noseworthy and his nine PhD students are pushing the limits of brain imaging in ways we’ve never seen before. They’re writing new software and building hardware, mapping out new algorithms, and building prototypes for everything from ergometric bikes that monitor how exercise affects the brain to sensor-equipped helmets that will alert hockey players to traumatic brain injury (TBI) at its earliest stages.“We build stuff,” says the associate professor, electrical and computer engineering. “Our students are trained not only in biomedical engineering, but also in anatomy, physiology and electrical and computer engineering. That’s what makes the McMaster biomedical engineering program so fantastic.”Noseworthy’s own CV reveals a storied past. He got into imaging as a graduate student in the mid-1980s, when MRIs were still in their infancy. Jobs were scarce then, and he ended up working as a pig farmer before landing a position imaging animals for the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph.“You had to be a physicist to run the equipment back then. I did everything. I was building stuff, fixing stuff, doing research imaging on lab animals and clinical imaging of people’s pets. Every day was a new challenge, and there was no one you could call for advice – I think there were only three human MRI scanners in Canada at the time.”He did his post-doctoral fellowship in imaging physics at the University of Toronto, then spent three years as a medical physicist at the Hospital for Sick Children, where he cut his clinical teeth and built his skills in neurosurgical planning. “My job was to map out key areas of the brain so neurosurgeons could choose the best surgical approaches.”When the offer came to head up McMaster’s new Imaging Research Centre, Noseworthy jumped at the chance. “How could I refuse an opportunity to run my own imaging lab with an MRI dedicated 24/7 to research? I was used to doing my research at midnight on clinical scanners that were unavailable during the day, so this was heaven.”He arrived with his graduate and post-doctoral students in tow to a setup that was less than ideal. “It was just a big open area with a magnet in it. I sat in a carrel like a student, with piles of computers and books all around, running different software programs. We had 18 or 19 computers and it would get so hot in there that the students would strip down to their undies,” he laughs, quickly adding that back then it was an all-male group.“I remember thinking how do we grow this. I knew that non-invasive imaging technology was the way to go. I knew we had to build that.”And build it he did, with funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), plus a $2.5 million lab upgrade from St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton where the lab is located.The lab’s original MRI scanner has since been upgraded to a high-powered model that is twice the strength of a clinical model. It’s one of only a handful in the country earmarked solely for research, and the only one equipped with both broadband radio frequency and a proton decoupler.The MRI scanner shares space with the region’s only PET/CT (positron emission tomography/computed tomography) scanner, an electroencephalography (EEG) system that can operate simultaneously with MRI, plus ultrasound and real-time optical imaging. There are also labs for building, testing and repairing custom magnetic resonance (MR) imaging coils and developing customized imaging phantoms that allow for fine-tuning various imaging devices.But the equipment, while instrumental, is merely an agent for what Noseworthy and his research team do best – refine and combine the latest neuroimaging techniques to produce high-resolution brain maps and images showing structural, functional and metabolic abnormalities at their earliest stage.Using a variety of advanced imaging methodologies – susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) fractal dimension mapping – Noseworthy and his students are able to highlight specific areas of the brain that are improperly functioning or damaged, visualizations that would not be picked up by a conventional MRI scan.SWI, for instance, produces high-resolution images sensitive to blood and iron, so micro-hemorrhages common to mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) are easier to detect. Concussions and other forms of (mTBI) account for about 75% of TBIs, and can cause severe and longlasting effects. Yet fewer than one per cent of these injuries show up on routine MRI and CT scans.“I saw a teenager who suffered a head injury, and a year and a half later he was still not right,” says Noseworthy. “He had gone from being an A student to a D student, but his MRI scans were normal. Only when we used SWI were we able to detect the tiny previous hemorrhage spots.”SWI is also being used to detect microbleeds linked to acute stroke and dementia, and is proving useful in quantifying iron content for multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson’s disease. In a similar fashion, BOLD fractal dimension mapping helps to zero in on Alzheimer’s disease, which is linked to a reduction in (healthy) chaotic brain activity, while DTI captures subtle white matter abnormalities seen in mTBI and a host of other neurodegenerative diseases, including epilepsy and schizophrenia.“Being able to find abnormalities in a person’s brain when routine clinical scans show the brain as normal really hits home with people who have had a brain injury,” says Noseworthy. “They know there’s something wrong, but the doctors say there isn’t.”The Centre is also the only Canadian imaging research lab equipped with MRI-compatible exercise bikes for the study of both adults and children. Unlike routine MRI scans where subjects are told to keep still, patients are asked to put pedal to the metal to show good solid movement.“It is well known that patients recovering from TBI often experience a recurrence of TBI symptoms with the onset of exercise,” says Noseworthy. “By measuring what is happening in the brain before, during and after exercise, we can more carefully monitor a patient’s recovery.”He believes the potential to improve diagnosis, management and surgical precision is limitless. “Non-invasive neuroimaging is moving ahead by leaps and bounds. And because it’s only magnets and radiowaves, it can be used over and over again with no risk to the patient.“The future will bring even better approaches with higher sensitivity that will improve our ability to diagnose and manage a whole range of diseases that we still don’t have an answer for.
工程师们正在开发一些最先进的技术来揭示人脑的工作原理和结构。Mike Noseworthy(在左边)和他的研究团队。工程学和大脑似乎两极分化，但是一些最先进的技术揭示了人类大脑的运作和结构，这是由工程师们开发出来的。麦克马斯特的Mike Noseworthy是那些重新定义我们如何看待大脑的人之一。核磁共振成像物理学家是生物医学工程师，迈克是麦克马斯特脑体研究所的成像研究中心，研究人员正致力于增进我们对大脑、大脑和身体如何协同工作以影响健康和疾病的理解。Noseworthy和他的9个博士学生都用了最先进的核磁共振扫描仪，用我们从未见过的方式来推动大脑成像的极限。他们正在编写新的软件和建造硬件，绘制新的算法，并为所有的东西建立原型，从能监测运动如何影响大脑到传感器装备的头盔，这些头盔将会提醒曲棍球运动员在早期的创伤性脑损伤(TBI)。“我们制造东西，”副教授，电气和计算机工程的副教授说。“我们的学生不仅接受了生物医学工程的训练，还接受了解剖学、生理学、电气和计算机工程的培训。这就是为什么麦克马斯特生物医学工程项目如此神奇的原因。”Noseworthy自己的简历揭示了一个传奇的过去。他在上世纪80年代中期成为一名研究生，当时MRIs还处于起步阶段。那时，他的工作很稀少，后来他成了养猪的农民，后来在圭尔夫大学的安大略兽医学院找到了一个位置成像动物。“那时你必须是一个物理学家，才能运行设备。”我所做的一切。我在建造东西，修理东西，做实验室动物的研究成像和人们的宠物的临床成像。每一天都是一个新的挑战，没有人可以给你打电话——我想当时加拿大只有三个人的核磁共振扫描仪。”他在多伦多大学做了博士后研究，之后在医院做了三年的医学物理学家，在那里他为患病的孩子做了手术，在那里，他切除了自己的临床牙，并在神经外科规划中建立了自己的技能。“我的工作是绘制出大脑的关键区域，这样神经外科医生就可以选择最好的手术方法。”当这项提议成为麦克马斯特的新成像研究中心时，Noseworthy欣然接受了这个机会。“我怎么能拒绝一个利用核磁共振成像技术来运行我自己的成像实验室的机会呢?”我习惯在午夜做我的研究，在白天无法使用的临床扫描仪，所以这是天堂。”他和他的研究生和博士后们一起来到了一个不太理想的环境。“它只是一个巨大的开放区域，里面有一块磁铁。我坐在一个像学生一样的卡雷尔里，到处都是成堆的电脑和书籍，运行着不同的软件程序。我们有18台或19台电脑，那里的电脑会非常热，学生们会把它脱下来。”他笑着说，并很快补充道，那是一个全是男性的团体。“我记得我们是怎么发展这个的。”我知道非侵入性成像技术是一种方法。我知道我们必须要建立这个。”他在自然科学和工程研究委员会(NSERC)、加拿大创新基金会(CFI)和加拿大卫生研究院(CIHR)的资助下，再加上实验室所在地圣约瑟夫的医疗保健汉密尔顿实验室的250万美元的实验室升级。实验室最初的核磁共振成像扫描仪已经升级为一种高性能的模型，其强度是临床模型的两倍。它是仅有的少数几个专门用于研究的国家之一，而且唯一一个配备有宽带无线电频率和一个质子束的人。核磁共振成像扫描仪与该地区唯一的pet/ct(正电子发射断层扫描/计算机断层扫描)扫描仪共享空间，这是一种可以同时使用MRI进行操作的脑电图(EEG)系统，以及超声和实时光学成像。还有一些实验室用于建造、测试和修复自定义的磁共振(MR)成像线圈，并开发定制的成像幻影，以便对各种成像设备进行微调。但是，设备，虽然是仪器，但仅仅是Noseworthy和他的研究团队做得最好的一种手段——改进并结合最新的神经成像技术，以产生高分辨率的大脑地图和图像，显示其早期的结构、功能和代谢异常。使用各种先进的成像方法-敏感-加权成像(瑞士)，扩散张量成像(DTI)，血氧水平的依赖(大胆的)分形维图-Noseworthy和他的学生能够突出显示大脑的特定区域
研究成果三：推进科学领域
Geriatric epidemiologist Parminder Raina is the founding director of the new McMaster Institute of Geroscience -- the first of its kind in Canada.Parminder Raina.Is 80 the new 60? It will be if Parminder Raina has his way.A geriatric epidemiologist and Canada Research Chair in Geroscience at McMaster, Raina is leading one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever done on health and aging. Its aim is to understand the factors that influence how we age and find ways to prevent, slow or cure age-related diseases so we can live healthier for longer.With Canadians aged 85 and over now the fastest-growing segment of the population, studying how people age is more important than ever before.“We are undergoing a demographic shift of epic proportions,” says Raina, whose earlier work with the Health Canada-sponsored Canadian Study on Health and Aging(CLSA) explored the prevalence of dementia among Canadian seniors.“During the next two decades, the number of seniors will double. We now have more centenarians than ever before, and not all of them are senile and functionally dependent. Many live very full lives.”Understanding how we age, why we each age differently, and what causes disease and disability as we grow older is critical to our ability to develop programs and interventions that will stave off poor health and promote independent and healthy living for as long as possible.With a national team of more than 160 researchers and collaborators, the CLSA is following 50,000 randomly selected men and women between the ages of 45 and 85 over a 20-year period to learn why some people live longer and others don’t. Major funders of this project are the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR),the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Ministry of Research Innovation in Ontario, and other participating provinces.McMaster’s Innovation Park in Hamilton is home to the CLSA national coordinating centre, and one of 11 data collection sites across the country. It’s also where the 340 million anticipated bits of data from blood and urine samples, cognitive and physical assessments, and interviews and questionnaires completed by participants will be sent and stored. Facilities include a state-of-the-art biobank equipped with 31 cryofreezers and a lab equipped with a high-throughput robotic workstation that can test for biomarkers associated with aging process as well as age-related diseases.More than 38,000 Canadians have been recruited since 2011, and the study will reach its goal of 50,000 participants in 2015. The first wave of data – gleaned from telephone interviews with the first 20,000 CLSA participants – will be released this summer.The other group of participants is asked to visit a data collection site, first when they sign up for the study, then every three years thereafter. This allows researchers to monitor changing biological, medical, psychological, social, lifestyle and economic aspects of the peoples’ lives.“We want to know how each aspect – alone and in combination – impacts the health and development of disease and disability as people age,” says Raina.“Genetics plays a factor, we know, but there are other influences that can put us on one path vs. another. Children leave home, people retire, there’s economic gain or loss. Midlife brings all sorts of transitions, especially for women who are undergoing biological changes such as menopause. How do these transitions affect people’s health, and how do they adapt? What role do communities, social support, community and health systems play? How does living in an urban or rural environment impact the aging process?”It’s a cell-to-society approach that will yield a mine of rich data that can be used by researchers worldwide to examine diseases of the circulatory system, the brain, the musculoskeletal system, respiratory system and endocrine/metabolic systems.“We know that the changes in our body that come with aging represent a common risk factor for disease,” says Raina, who as is holds the Endowed Labarge Chair in Optimal Aging. He has conducted numerous leading-edge studies on aging and disease prevention.“What we learn from this could tell us a lot about how chronic inflammation is linked to cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease; how responses to stress can accelerate aging and risk of disease; how work history, wealth contribute to our health and well-being; and more.”By taking an integrated approach to the study of disease and disability associated with aging, Raina has advanced the field of geroscience and breaking walls between disciplines to get gerontologists, geriatricians, biologists, psychologists and others to look at the science of aging from a holistic perspective.“I started talking to people on campus and found that there were more than 50 faculty members who were working in the area of aging but never said so,” he recalls. He began campaigning for a university-wide virtual institute that would bring them all under one umbrella.Approved in April by the University’s Board of Governors, the McMaster Institute of GeroScience will be the first of its kind in Canada to bring together interdisciplinary groups of faculty members and postgraduate students to conduct collaborative cutting-edge research on aging.“There is no other institution better equipped to do this,” argues Raina. “We have the kind of capacity that doesn’t exist anywhere else in Canada – but for us to establish leadership in Canada and internationally we need to attract resources to create infrastructure like Big Data Centre, an aging mouse colony, a technology centre – that will make us competitive to to attract funding from research agencies.”The new Institute will be closely linked with another initiative close to Raina’s heart, the McMaster Optimal Aging Portal, a web site dedicated to making the best and most up-to-date research evidence on healthy aging available free of charge (and in both official languages) to the public, researchers, health-care professionals and policymakers.“It’s one thing to generate research; it’s another thing to get it into the hands of those who can make decisions,” says the director of the CIHR-funded McMaster Evidence Review and Synthesis Centre. Based in Hamilton, the Centre provides synthesized research evidence that can be used to inform clinical practice.Launched in April, the Portal is an initiative of the Labarge Optimal Aging Initiative, which was created with a $10-million donation from businesswoman and McMaster alum Suzanne Labarge. It’s the first online resource anywhere to appraise research on aging from around the world, and tell people what works and what doesn’t.If this sounds like a master plan to position McMaster as a national and global leader in the field of aging, it is. Because global, says Raina, is the only place to be.“No single country can do this alone. We need sample sizes in the hundreds of thousands to speed up the research and allow us to answer questions and evaluate policies in a very short time.”He currently has two proposals before the European Union. One, involving 15 countries, would look at how urbanization impacts aging.“More and more people are living in urban centres. Cities have more congestion and pollution, but they also provide better access to health care and community services. We want to examine the tradeoffs to understand the overall impact.”Another one looking to examine how multiple morbidity affects the functions of older people. “Do different combinations have different effects on functioning, and how long people live or how early they die?”Knowing this could have a dramatic effect on the quality of life for those living with two or more chronic conditions. “If you have high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis and diabetes, you may be taking six or seven different medications. All of them influence the way you function. Maybe we can get rid of some that are not as important as others.”For Raina, it’s all about giving people the knowledge to make informed decisions. “We want those who need complex care to get the right kind, and those who are living independently to be able to do so for as long as possible. And that’s a very achievable goal.”
老年流行病学家Parminder Raina是新成立的McMaster科学研究所的创始主任，这是加拿大第一个类似的研究。Parminder蕾娜。80是60吗?如果Parminder Raina有他的方式，那就会是。Raina是一名老年流行病学家和加拿大科学研究中心的研究主任，他领导了一项关于健康和衰老的最大、最全面的研究。它的目的是了解影响我们年龄的因素，并找到预防、延缓或治愈与年龄有关的疾病的方法，这样我们就能活得更久。如今，85岁以上的加拿大人是人口增长最快的群体，研究人们的年龄比以往任何时候都更重要。Raina说:“我们正在经历一场大规模的人口结构变化。”他早期的工作是在加拿大健康和老龄化(里昂)研究加拿大老年人的老年痴呆症研究中发现的。“在接下来的20年里，老年人的数量将会翻倍。我们现在有了比以往任何时候都多的人，也不是所有的人都是老年性的和功能性的。许多人过着非常充实的生活。”了解我们的年龄，为什么我们每个年龄的不同，以及随着我们年龄的增长导致疾病和残疾的原因对我们的能力来说是至关重要的，我们有能力制定计划和干预措施，以避免不良的健康，并尽可能地促进独立和健康的生活。在一个由160多名研究人员和合作者组成的全国团队中，里昂证券跟踪调查了5万名年龄在45岁到85岁之间的男性和女性，以了解为什么有些人寿命更长，而另一些人则没有。该项目的主要出资人是加拿大卫生研究院(CIHR)、加拿大创新和安大略省研究创新部以及其他参与省。麦克马斯特在汉密尔顿的创新公园是里昂证券国家协调中心的所在地，也是全国11个数据收集点之一。这也是3.4亿人预期的数据，包括血液和尿液样本，认知和身体评估，以及参与者完成的访谈和调查问卷将会被发送和储存。这些设施包括一个最先进的生物库，配备了31个冷冻剂和一个配备高通量机器人工作站的实验室，可以测试与衰老过程有关的生物标志物，以及与年龄相关的疾病。自2011年以来，已经有超过3.8万名加拿大人被招募，这项研究将在2015年达到5万名参与者的目标。第一批数据将于今年夏天公布，首批数据来自于对首批2万名里昂证券参与者的电话采访。另一组参与者被要求访问一个数据收集网站，首先是他们报名参加这项研究，然后每隔三年进行一次。这使得研究人员能够监测人们生活中生物、医学、心理、社会、生活方式和经济方面的变化。Raina说:“我们想知道，随着人们的年龄，每个方面都是如何影响疾病和残疾的健康和发展的。”“遗传学是一个因素，我们知道，但也有其他因素可以让我们走上一条道路。”孩子们离开家，人们退休，经济上的收益或损失。中年带来了各种各样的转变，尤其是对于那些正在经历更年期的女性来说。这些转变如何影响人们的健康，他们如何适应?社区、社会支持、社区和卫生系统发挥了什么作用?生活在城市或农村的环境对老龄化进程有何影响?”这是一种从细胞到社会的方法，它将产生一个丰富的数据，供全世界的研究人员使用，用来检查循环系统、大脑、肌肉骨骼系统、呼吸系统和内分泌/代谢系统的疾病。Raina说:“我们知道，随着年龄的增长，我们身体的变化代表着疾病的共同风险因素。”他说，他是被捐赠的拉法基椅在最佳年龄。他对衰老和疾病预防进行了大量的前沿研究。“我们从中学到的东西可以告诉我们，慢性炎症与癌症、心脏病和阿尔茨海默病有什么联系;如何应对压力会加速衰老和疾病的风险;工作的历史，财富对我们的健康和幸福的贡献;等等。”通过采取一种综合的方法来研究与衰老有关的疾病和残疾，Raina已经推进了老年科学和打破学科之间的障碍，让老年医学专家、老年医学专家、生物学家、心理学家和其他一些人从整体的角度来看待衰老的科学。他回忆说:“我开始和校园里的人交谈，发现有50多名教师在老化的领域工作，但从来没有这么说过。”他开始为一个大学范围的虚拟学院开展竞选活动。
>>>请继续阅读第3页为麦克马斯特大学校园环境和杰出校友详细介绍。
