Katie Vandeloo began researching why women are so susceptible to Alzheimer’s after her grandmother got the disease. On the same day Vandeloo found out she’d won a prestigious award to support her work, her grandmother died.
“It was a full-circle moment that solidified my calling to pursue this work,” says Vandeloo, who won an , given to researchers focused on women’s health and wellbeing.
Women live longer than men, and that’s often cited as the reason they’re far more likely to get dementia, so much so that two-thirds of Canadians with Alzheimer’s are women. But Vandeloo is investigating whether something else plays a role in pushing those rates so high — menopause.
It’s known that inflammation in the body is one of the greatest factors in developing Alzheimer’s, though women have a natural defense against the disease through estrogen, a hormone known to protect against cognitive decline and associated with having fewer illnesses related to Alzheimer’s development. Not only does menopause cause a severe decline in estrogen levels, that hormonal drop has also been found to increase inflammation in the body.
Vandeloo is using real-time neuroimaging techniques at the Sunnybrook Research Institute to investigate how inflammation in the brain influences cognitive function in women who’ve gone through menopause, and whether the age at which they did also impacts what happens to their brains.
Knowing more about the relationship between menopause and women’s risk of dementia could lead to better prevention and treatment strategies.
Vandeloo says that studying risk factors, such as inflammation and early versus late menopause, and their impact on the brain and cognition, may hold the key.
“Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute important insights to our understanding of disparities in Alzheimer’s disease risk between women and men,” she says.
Researcher to use special neuroimaging skills
Vandeloo is an aspiring neuroscientist and clinical psychologist completing her master's degree in clinical psychology at ϲʿӿ, affiliated with the lab of Konstantine Zakzanis, professor in the Department of Psychology. Her investigation into menopause combines her clinical knowledge with her background in neuroscience and psychiatry, and the specialized skills in neuroimaging analysis she picked up from her research internship at Harvard Medical School.
She went to Harvard in part using the funds from the . She was recognized for her work uncovering the biological differences in the brains of people with treatment-resistant depression and a history of suicide. She was also an MRI analyst at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Mental Health Research, where she mentored undergraduate and graduate students.
At the Sunnybrook Research Institute, Vandeloo is being co-supervised by neuropsychologist Jennifer Rabin, and is working with researchers under Maged Goubran, assistant professor in U of T’s Department of Medical Biophysics.
“I am pulling from that expertise and collaborating with members of Dr. Goubran's group to ensure methodological rigor in this project,” Vandeloo says.