Grey Area: Dr. John Howland on Cannabis & Budding Brains
Release Date: 09/30/2024
Not Just Numbers: Vaidehee Lanke Tracks Opiate Use & Perinatal Health
Researchers Under the Scope
In this episode, medical student and researcher shares what large provincial datasets reveal about opioid use disorder, maternal mental health, and pregnancy. Armed with data, she hopes better support —before, during, and after birth—can change outcomes for mothers and babies. Lanke spent her summer working with epidemiologist and the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit on a pan-Canadian project tracking opioid use in perinatal populations across five provinces. “The question we set out to answer was: What is the association between...
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Researchers Under the Scope
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EEEV-ident Passion: Eve Simpson on Doubt, Persistence and Viral Spread
Researchers Under the Scope
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That’s So Metal: Dr. Jessica Sheldon Targets Acinetobacter Baumannii
Researchers Under the Scope
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Fluid Endeavour: Kirk Haan's Medical Balancing Act
Researchers Under the Scope
Kirk Haan graduated from high school, thinking he’d study pharmacy at the University of Saskatchewan, and walk out five years later. After one summer at a pharmacy, Haan realized he was after a more ‘hands-on’ career in medicine. “I’ve kind of worked with my hands my whole life, just between rummaging around on a farm and always kind of building things,” he said. “Now it’s using them to help people in a direct way.” Then, Haan found his passion — inside the laboratory. In 2018, Haan landed a summer position in , studying osmoregulation — the mechanisms that govern...
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Dr. Sébastien Gauvrit: Fishing for Answers in Vascular Development
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Dr. Stu Skinner & Mobile Medicine: Halting Syphilis & HIV
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Stuart Skinner (MD) knew something was wrong three years ago, when patients started coming to him with vision loss, fever, rashes, and meningitis. Almost every case could be traced back to untreated syphilis — a sexually transmitted infection with caseloads exploding 1,200 per cent from 2017. Saskatchewan saw this spike just as Covid-19 entered the picture. “With the pandemic, testing dropped dramatically,” Skinner said, noting this , often travelling alongside HIV. Syphilis often spreads through sores, and can remain unnoticed for months or years on end, making early detection...
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Peptide Puzzle: Dr. Yi-Chun Chen on Early Markers for Diabetes and Obesity
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In the Trenches: Dr. James Stempien on Emergency Medicine
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All’s Not Lost: A Roadmap to Treating Hepatitis C on the Prairies
Researchers Under the Scope
As the world aims to eradicate hepatitis C (HCV) by 2030, Carrielynn Lund and Dr. Alexandra King’s team created a how-to guide. is a step-by-step guide to tackling a spike of new infections across the three Canadian prairie provinces. Hepatitis C (HCV) causes severe liver disease, and was notoriously difficult to treat until the introduction of direct-acting antivirals a decade ago — antivirals which boast a remarkable 95% success rate. Despite this advancement, Lund and Dr. King say Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba need to know why HCV cases keep rising, particularly in...
info_outlineA behavioural neuroscientist in Saskatoon is uncovering marijuana’s effects on fetal brain development.
After recently winning a five-year CIHR grant of $960,076 in the spring of 2024, Dr. John Howland’s lab at the University of Saskatchewan is expanding its work examining prenatal exposure to cannabis smoke. Howland’s teams will assess the way cannabis exposure alters higher brain functions like memory and learning in both rats and mice.
Compared to cannabis injections in the past, the professor of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology at the College of Medicine said exposing rodents to high-potency smoke for up to 15 minutes at a time provides a more realistic picture of marijuana's effects on fetal brain development.
Over their lives, Howland will measure changes in cortical limbic circuitruity, for both rodent mothers and their offspring.
“The cortex is definitely involved, but we also look at other areas like the hippocampus and the amygdala,” said Howland. “There’s pretty good evidence that they are at least subtly affected after gestational exposure to cannabis.”
Now, it’s a matter of quantifying which circuits cannabis affects in the rodent brain — under circumstances as close to real-life human exposure as Howland's laboratory can create.
"It's not simple," said Howland. He notes a wide variety of phenotypes of THC and CBD strains are now available at retailers, each with its own characteristics and potential interactions with neurons.
“These receptors are involved in many discrete events during brain development,” he said. "We're hoping to be more controlled and more specific."
"It turns out a lot of things that are legal like alcohol and tobacco aren't that safe during pregnancy either," said Howland.
"I think more knowledge has to be helpful as women make these decisions for themselves.”