One out of every six to seven men will develop prostate cancer in his lifetime¹. Of those prostate cancer patients, about 25 to 30 per cent will present late or have a recurrence that is typically indicative of metastatic advanced disease, meaning the cancer has spread throughout the body and is virtually incurable. Such difficult cases have propelled Vancouver Prostate Centre (VPC) scientists Dr. Artem Cherkasov and Dr.

New findings from a study nearly a decade in the making suggest that use of fluorescence visualization (FV) during oral cancer surgery drastically improves the accuracy of the removal of cancerous tissue, significantly reducing local recurrence rates of oral cancer.

“Approximately one-in-three patients who undergo surgery to remove cancerous oral lesions will experience a recurrence of the disease within three years,” says Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist and study lead author Dr. Catherine Poh.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) patients face a double-edged sword when it comes to three new disease-modifying drugs (DMDs) that have been approved within the past five years to treat MS, says Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Helen Tremlett.

Prescribing a wheelchair – a life-altering piece of health equipment – to  a patient without follow-up to check comfort and proper use happens far too often and is a disservice to society, says Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Bill Miller.

Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Robert Tarzwell’s research is creating a space for neuroimaging in psychiatry that has not existed until now. Two studies co-authored by Dr. Tarzwell that were published in 2015 have demonstrated the efficacy and accuracy of using brain scans – and more specifically, single-positron emission computed tomography (SPECT) functional neuroimaging – to help diagnose and ultimately better guide treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

As 2015 draws to a close and we are inundated with reports of violence and a growing humanitarian crisis, it is understandable that people may be feeling more miserable than festive and merry this holiday season.

Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Helen Tremlett’s favourite discovery during her year-long sabbatical spent studying the microbiome – that constellation of trillions of bacterial microbes that reside mostly in the gut (but also all over the body) – is that baby elephants practice coprophagia. In other words, they eat their herd’s feces. Although the elephants’ behaviour, common in many animal species, may be unseemly to humans, one vital purpose of eating dung is to provide good, foreign bacteria to the young elephants missing them from their digestive systems.