Ask 31-year-old Vancouver resident Madeline Laberge about what triggers her asthma and she’ll say with a sigh: “Basically any living thing the world”. Exposure to cats, dogs, trees, flowers, grasses, pollens, dust – the list goes on – all make breathing more challenging for Laberge whose asthma is categorized as severe and uncontrolled.

Since being diagnosed with asthma at two-and-a-half years old, Laberge has tried multiple different combinations of medications, most of which have been corticosteroids taken regularly to calm the inflammation of her airways. 

Every day, we’re inundated with messages and images pressuring us to achieve impossible standards of physical beauty, the most important being a slim waistline. It’s not a surprise then that people living in larger bodies face weight bias. What is alarming is when that bias comes from their primary care physician.

Stroke patients have a lot of challenges, such as trying to relearn lost motor skills, dealing with paralysis, and finding new ways to communicate with speech impairment. But there’s another challenge that often presents long after a stroke, and is poorly understood: pain. 

Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute investigators are trying to get a better picture of post-stroke pain and they’re asking patients to help. 

Imagine suddenly realizing that you can’t hear as well as you did few days ago. You haven’t been exposed to loud noise, you don’t have symptoms of an ear infection, and you haven’t had enough birthdays to dismiss it as being due to old age. Your doctor’s diagnosis of “sudden hearing loss” doesn’t help you understand what’s going on or put you at ease. Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Desmond Nunez would understand your frustration.

Studies touting the ills of living a sedentary lifestyle have been numerous in recent years, but few have grabbed headlines quite like one recently published in The Lancet that found that sitting for eight hours a day or more could increase a person’s risk of premature death by up to 60 percent.

As athletes from around the world converge in Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, a Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist will be there to make sure they play safe and play fair. Dr. Babak Shadgan will oversee medical care for more than 300 Olympic wrestlers. Wrestling was a keystone event in the Ancient Olympics and still holds a special place in the modern games. But these days, wrestlers compete in an arena where tiny training modifications can make the difference between getting gold or going home. Dr.

Printing out an entire three-dimensional, living, human organ sounds like something seen in a sci-fi summer blockbuster, but it’s fast becoming reality. Researchers such as Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) scientist Dr. Jeremy Hirota, whose work focuses on the immune system of the lungs, are using the technology for exciting health exploration and discovery. 

One of the many ways in which Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) fulfills its mandate to support and promote excellence in health research is through its annual Investigator Awards competition, The peer-reviewed salary support awards allow investigators at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH), UBC Hospital, and G.F.