Brain cells that aid appetite control identified

Discovery opens door to development of new drugs to control weight gain and obesity

Date:

May 12, 2016

Source:

McGill University

Summary:

Brain cells that play a crucial role in appetite and weight gain has been identified. They are known as NG2-glia cells.Although these cells exist within different parts of the brain, it is those found in a specific brain structure called the median eminence that are crucial to weight control. The discovery opens the door to development of new drugs designed to control weight gain and obesity.

It’s rare for scientists to get what they describe as “clean” results without spending a lot of time repeating the same experiment over and over again. But when researchers saw the mice they were working with doubling their weight within a month or two, they knew they were on to something.

“About twenty years ago there was a big step forward in our understanding of obesity when researchers discovered that our appetite is controlled by a key molecule called leptin. Leptin is a hormone which is produced by our fat cells, and is delivered by the blood to the brain to signal the brain that we are full and can stop eating,” explains Dr. Maia Kokoeva who is affiliated both with McGill University and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre. “But even though receptors for leptin were discovered soon after in the hypothalamus, a brain area that regulates food intake and body weight, it has remained unclear how exactly leptin is detected.”

So about four years ago, Kokoeva and her team set out to explore which brain cells might play a role in the process of leptin sensing and weight gain. The answer, it turns out, lies in the median eminence.

“Protection” and “preservation” cells in a busy place

The median eminence is a brain structure at the base of the hypothalamus. It is a bit like a busy hub or market place through which hormones and molecules of various kinds travel in both directions between the brain and the bloodstream to ensure that the body functions smoothly.

The McGill research team has now discovered that without a particular group of cells (known as NG2-glia cells) in place in the median eminence, the leptin receptors in the brain never receive the messages from the body telling it that it is sated.

“Most of the brain is a well-protected fortress, designed to shelter delicate nerve cells,” says Kokoeva. “The median eminence is outside these protections, and so can be a dangerous environment for the nerve cells that detect leptin. We think that the NG2-glia cells act to support and shelter the leptin receptor neurons, enabling them to instruct the body when to stop eating.”

Crucial role of the median eminence in weight gain

“We developed an interest in NG2-glia cells in this specific part of the brain because unlike neurons, during much of our adult lives these cells are constantly dividing and they do so most actively in the median eminence,” says Tina Djogo, a McGill doctoral student and one of two lead authors on the study which was published this week in Cell Metabolism. “But though these cells were first described about thirty years ago it has been difficult so far to pinpoint their exact functions in the adult brain.”

Because of their particularly high turnover in the median eminence, the researchers wondered if the NG2-glia cells might play a role in leptin sensing and therefore in appetite control. So they used a drug to kill the NG2-glia cells in the median eminence of a group of mice and then watched to see whether there was a difference in food intake. The results were stunning.

Within three days after they started to receive the medication, some of the mice dubbed “gainers” had already started to eat more compared with the control group of mice who had not received medication. And by 30 days afterwards, the weight of some of the mice had doubled — from 25 grams to around 50 grams.

“But what was most exciting to us, was that even though NG2-glia are found across the brain” explains Sarah Robins, a research associate who was also a lead author on this study, “it was only when we removed these cells from the median eminence that we saw this clear increase in body weight.”

A possible explanation for weight gain in brain tumour patients

The researchers then corroborated the role of the NG2-glia cells in the median eminence in appetite control through experiments using genetically modified mice, and also by using irradiation. This latter discovery suggested an explanation for a previously unexplained phenomenon in human brain cancer survivors.

“People who have been treated for brain tumours using radiation to block cell proliferation often become overweight,” says Kokoeva. “However, there has never been any satisfactory explanation, but our experiments in mice now suggests that the reason for this weight gain may be the loss of NG2-glia in the median eminence as a result of radiation.”

The researchers are hopeful that the identification of NG2-glia in the median eminence as crucial elements in body weight and appetite control will pave the way to new targeted anti-obesity approaches directed towards maintaining or raising the NG2-glia population in the median eminence.

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Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by McGill University. The original item was written by Katherine Gombay. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Tina Djogo, Sarah C. Robins, Sarah Schneider, Darya Kryzskaya, Xiaohong Liu, Andrew Mingay, Colleen J. Gillon, Joo Hyun Kim, Kai-Florian Storch, Ulrich Boehm, Charles W. Bourque, Thomas Stroh, Leda Dimou, Maia V. Kokoeva. Adult NG2-Glia Are Required for Median Eminence-Mediated Leptin Sensing and Body Weight Control. Cell Metabolism, 2016; 23 (5): 797 DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2016.04.013

A pill-sized origami robot to clean up your stomach

An origami robot that can be swallowed in a pill and sent on missions inside the body promises a revolution in internal treatment of the digestive system, scientists claim.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sheffield University, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology trialled the fold-up device in a mock stomach and found it was able to dislodge and remove foreign objects such as batteries.

The researchers also believe the robot could be modified to deliver drugs and perform targeted surgery in otherwise inaccessible regions of the stomach and gut.

The device folds into a pill made of ice, pictured above left. When swallowed, the casing melts and the robot unfolds in the stomach and rolls around the stomach lining, controlled by magnetic fields outside the body.

Approximately 3500 batteries are accidentally swallowed in the US each year, according to the research team.

Although the batteries are often digested normally, if they come into prolonged contact with the tissue of the oesophagus or stomach they can cause an electric current that produces hydroxide and burns a hole in the tissue. Small and circular lithium batteries are a particular risk for small children.

The NHS holds no specific figures on the number of UK cases, but swallowing batteries is known to have caused the deaths of some children.

In trials conducted by the MIT-led team, the robot rolled towards the lithium battery before attaching itself. With the help of external magnets, the robot was then able to drag the battery away.

The scientists say the robot, and any foreign objects it is tasked with removing, can leave the body by being dragged towards the gut where it can be passed naturally.

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to healthcare,” said Daniela Rus, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Rus said she was initially sceptical about the importance of ensuring the robot could remove batteries until Shuhei Miyashita, now a lecturer at York University, gave her a crude demonstration.

“Shuhei bought a piece of ham and he put the battery on it,” she said.

“Within half an hour the battery was fully submerged in the ham, so that made me realise that, yes, this is important. If you have a battery in your body, you really want it out as soon as possible.”

The robot is made from the same type of dried pig intestine used in sausage casings. Rus said the ultimate aim was to develop sensors on the device so it could perform tasks automatically, without an external controller.

Dr Miyashita said the next stage would be to test the robot in the stomachs of animals such as cows before moving on to human trials.

NASA directly observes fundamental process of nature for first time

Like sending sensors up into a hurricane, NASA has flown four spacecraft through an invisiblemaelstrom in space, called magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is one of the prime drivers ofspace radiation and so it is a key factor in the quest to learn more about our space environment andprotect our spacecraft and astronauts as we explore farther and farther from our home planet.

Space is a better vacuum than any we can create on Earth, but it does contain some particles — and it’sbustling with activity. It overflows with energy and a complex system of magnetic fields. Sometimes,when two sets of magnetic fields connect, an explosive reaction occurs: As the magnetic fields re-alignand snap into a new formation they send particles zooming off in jets.

A new paper just printed in Science provides the first observations from inside a magnetic reconnectionevent. The research shows that magnetic reconnection is dominated by the physics of electrons — thusproviding crucial information about what powers this fundamental process in nature.

The effects of this sudden release of particles and energy — such as giant eruptions on the Sun, theaurora, radiation storms in near-Earth space, high energy cosmic particles that come from othergalaxies — have been observed throughout the solar system and beyond. But we have never been ableto witness the phenomenon of magnetic reconnection directly. Satellites have observed tantalisingglances of particles speeding by, but not the impetus — like seeing the debris flung out from a tornado,but never seeing the storm itself.

“We developed a mission, the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, that for the first time would have theprecision needed to gather observations in the heart of magnetic reconnection,” said Jim Burch, theprincipal investigator for MMS at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the firstauthor of the Science paper. “We received results faster than we could have expected. By seeingmagnetic reconnection in action, we have observed one of the fundamental forces of nature.”

MMS is made of four identical spacecraft that launched in March 2015. They fly in a pyramid formationto create a full 3-D map of any phenomena they observe. On 16&nbs;October 2015, the spacecrafttravelled straight through a magnetic reconnection event at the boundary where Earth’s magnetic fieldbumps up against the Sun’s magnetic field. In only a few seconds, the 25 sensors on each of thespacecraft collected thousands of observations. This unprecedented time cadence opened the door forscientists to track better than ever before how the magnetic and electric fields changed, as well as thespeeds and direction of the various charged particles.

The science of reconnection springs from the basic science of electromagnetics, which dominates mostof the universe and is a force as fundamental in space as gravity is on Earth. Any set of magnetic fieldscan be thought of as a row of lines. These field lines are always anchored to some body — a planet, astar — creating a giant magnetic network surrounding it. It is at the boundaries of two such networkswhere magnetic reconnection happens.

Imagine rows of magnetic field lines moving toward each other at such a boundary. (The boundary thatMMS travels through, for example, is the one where Earth’s fields meet the Sun’s.) The field lines aresometimes travelling in the same direction, and don’t have much effect on each other, like two watercurrents flowing along side each other.

But if the two sets of field lines point in opposite directions, the process of realigning is dramatic. It canbe hugely explosive, sending particles hurtling off at near the speed of light. It can also be slow andsteady. Either way it releases a huge amount of energy.

“One of the mysteries of magnetic reconnection is why it’s explosive in some cases, steady in others,and in some cases, magnetic reconnection doesn’t occur at all,” said Tom Moore, the mission scientistfor MMS at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Whether explosive or steady, the local particles are caught up in the event, hurled off to areas far away,crossing magnetic boundaries they never could have crossed otherwise. At the edges of Earth’smagnetic environment, the magnetosphere, such events allow solar radiation to enter near-Earth space.

“From previous satellites’ measurements, we know that the magnetic fields act like a slingshot, sendingthe protons accelerating out,” said Burch. “The decades-old mystery is what do the electrons do, andhow do the two magnetic fields interconnect. Satellite measurements of electrons have been too slowby a factor of 100 to sample the magnetic reconnection region. The precision and speed of the MMSmeasurements, however, opened up a new window on the universe, a new ‘microscope’ to seereconnection.”

With this new set of observations, MMS tracked what happens to electrons during magneticreconnection. As the four spacecraft flew across the magnetosphere’s boundary they flew directlythrough what’s called the dissipation region where magnetic reconnection occurred. The observationswere able to track how the magnetic fields suddenly shifted, and also how the particles moved away.

The observations show that the electrons shot away in straight lines from the original event at hundredsof miles per second, crossing the magnetic boundaries that would normally deflect them. Once acrossthe boundary, the particles curved back around in response to the new magnetic fields theyencountered, making a U-turn. These observations align with a computer simulation known as thecrescent model, named for the characteristic crescent shapes that the graphs show to represent howfar across the magnetic boundary the electrons can be expected to travel before turning around again.

A surprising result was that at the moment of interconnection between the Sun’s magnetic field linesand those of Earth the crescents turned abruptly so that the electrons flowed along the field lines. Bywatching these electron tracers, MMS made the first observation of the predicted breaking andinterconnection of magnetic fields in space.

“The data showed the entire process of magnetic reconnection to be fairly orderly and elegant,” saidMichael Hesse, a space scientist at Goddard who first developed the crescent model. “There doesn’tseem to be much turbulence present, or at least not enough to disrupt or complicate the process.”

Spotting the persistent characteristic crescent shape in the electron distributions suggests that it is thephysics of electrons that is at the heart of understanding how magnetic field lines accelerate theparticles.

“This shows us that the electrons move in such a way that electric fields are established and theseelectric fields in turn produce a flash conversion of magnetic energy,” said Roy Torbert, a scientist at theSpace Science Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, who is a co-author on the paper.“The encounter that our instruments were able to measure gave us a clearer view of an explosivereconnection energy release and the role played by electron physics.”

Since it launched, MMS has made more than 4,000 trips through the magnetic boundaries around Earth,each time gathering information about the way the magnetic fields and particles move. After its firstdirect observation of magnetic reconnection, it has flown through such an event five more times,providing more information about this fundamental process.

As the mission continues, the team can adjust the formation of the MMS spacecraft bringing themcloser together, which provides better viewing of electron paths, or further apart, which provides betterviewing of proton paths. Each set of observations contributes to explaining different aspects ofmagnetic reconnection. Together, such information will help scientists map out the details of our spaceenvironment — crucial information as we journey ever farther beyond our home planet.

Meet The New Garmin Forerunner 735XT: The Ultimate GPS Smartwatch For Athletes

The new Garmin Forerunner 735XT is a GPS smartwatch that not only tracks running, but also a number of other sports including swimming, cycling, hiking, multi-sport, strength training, XC skiing, paddle sports and cardio.

It is so far the most lightweight running watch created by Garmin and boasts a sleek design, comfortable silicone bands and a large color display for easy viewing of stats.

“This GPS running watch with multi-sport features is for athletes who want dialed-in data for training and a lighter load on a race day,” says Garmin. “A smaller form factor and comfortable band make 735XT the ideal watch to get you from workout through workday.”

The Forerunner 735XT is the first device built with the Strava Live Suffer Score app out of the box. With the app, users can keep track on whether they have been working hard or not based on the gathered heart rate data. They can also further customize the wearable by downloading free custom apps, data fields, watch faces and widgets from Garmin’s Connect IQ store.

“Strava Suffer Score analyzes your heart rate during a workout and ranks your total activity effort,” says Garmin.

Users can also take advantage of the free trial to Strava Premium, which is good for 60 days.

Other notable highlights of the Forerunner 735XT include recovery advisor, race predictor, lactate threshold, VO2 max estimate, smart notifications, live tracking, automatic uploads to Garmin Connect, auto multi-sport feature for one button to switch to another sports, and underwater heart rate for swimming.

Similar to its predecessor, the Forerunner 735XT works compatibly with Vector, Garmin’s pedal-based power meter system and with a number of Varia cycling accessories. Users can also pair the device with the HRM heart rate strap, capable of providing advanced running dynamics and measuring other data, such as vertical ration, ground contact time balance, stride length and more.

Users can connect the device to their smartphone for easy manipulation of music and to receive notifications on calls, emails and social network.

The latest model from Garmin is made from soft silicon material and lasts up to 14 hours in training mode. Used as a regular watch, the device can last up to 11 days of use. Color options include black/gray or midnight blue/frost blue.

The Forerunner 735XT is available for the retail price of $450.

Own a Raspberry Pi? You need to download this Raspbian Linux OS update — here’s what’s new

By Brian FagioliPublished 12 hours ago

Raspberry Pi 3

No matter how great hardware is, you need software to make it have any value. After all, what good is a computer without an operating system? Who would want a powerful graphics card without drivers? A good computing experience is the successful marriage between hardware and software.

A great example of this is the Raspberry Pi. At first, the specs and diminutive size pull you in, but then you must ask, what can you do with it? You will need to install an operating system to get started, and one of the most popular is Raspbian. Today, that lightweight Linux distro gets a big update. There are some significant updates here, so trust me when I say you need to get it!
If you are a Linux geek like me, you will be excited to know that the kernel has been updated to 4.4. While this may not be meaningful to the casual end-user, developers and more advanced users will appreciate it.

The most notable change, however, is the addition of a UI toggle for the integrated Bluetooth in the Raspberry Pi 3. Simon Long, UX Engineer says the following:

I’d hoped to be able to use one of the existing Linux Bluetooth UIs, but on trying them all, none were really what I was looking for in terms of usability and integration with the look and feel of the desktop. I really didn’t want to write one from scratch, but that ended up being what I did, which meant a fun few weeks trying to make head or tail of the mysteries of BlueZ and D-Bus. After a few false starts, I finally got something I felt was usable, and so there is now a Bluetooth plugin for the lxpanel taskbar.

btdialog

Yeah, it seems a bit embarrassing to have such a minor thing missing from the previous release, but Long explains that the team simply ran out of time. For the typical consumer computer, such a thing would be unforgivable. On a dev-friendly low-cost SoC? Totally fine.

Unfortunately, Bluetooth support still remains limited, but I think the limitation will be fine for many. As of now, you can only interact with mice, keyboards, and audio devices, but hey, that is what most folks will want anyway, right?

sdcc

Another cool addition is a new backup tool. Long explains the refreshingly simplistic “SD Card Copier”:

One query which comes up a lot on the forums is about the best way to back up your Pi. People also want to know how to migrate their Raspbian install to a new SD card which is larger or smaller than the one they are using at the moment. This has been difficult with the command-line tools that we’ve recommended in the past, so there is now a new application to help with this, and you’ll find it in the menu under ‘Accessories’.

The SD Card Copier application will copy Raspbian from one card to another — that’s pretty much all it does — but there are several useful things that you can do as a result. To use it, you will need a USB SD card writer.

There are many other updates too, including improvements to the mouse settings, and the ability to empty the wastebasket through right-clicking as seen below (yes, seriously). There is even a new shutdown dialog, something even casual users should notice.

ewaste

If you want to do a fresh install of the operating system, you can get it here. Existing ‘Jessie’ users wanting to do an upgrade should use the following commands in terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install piclone geany usb-modeswitch
sudo apt-get install python-pigpio python3-pigpio

What do you think of the new version of Raspbian? Give it a go, and tell me in the comments.

DARPA demos mind-controlled robotic arm
robotic arm darpa
Johnny Matheny, wearing a prosthetic arm that attaches to his body, shakes hands with a visitor during DARPA Demo Day on May 11, 2016, at the Pentagon. Credit: C. Todd Lopez
The artificial arm connects to an implanted device in the bone of the user’s arm

Sharon Gaudin By Sharon Gaudin FOLLOW
Computerworld | May 13, 2016 1:45 PM PT
The U.S. military is supporting research for a mind-controlled prosthetic arm that is surgically implanted into the user’s body.

“This is the most advanced arm in the world,” Johnny Matheny, who lost his left arm to cancer in 2008 and demonstrated the robotic arm for DARPA, said in a statement. “This one can do anything your natural arm can do, with the exception of the Vulcan V. But unless I meet a Vulcan, I won’t need it.”
Matheny showed the arm during Demo Day for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s research unit, which was held Wednesday at the Pentagon. The device was developed at the Research and Exploratory Development Department at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

The robotic arm is attached to a piece of metal that is surgically implanted into the bone of the user’s arm in technique called osseointegration. Matheny is the first person in the U.S. to have undergone the procedure, according to the U.S. Army.

The Army called the system a “true man/machine interface.”

The mind-controlled aspect of the arm comes into play via the nerves and muscles in what remains of the user’s arm. Those tissues send signals to the robotic arm, which responds to them as a real arm would.

“This is part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program, where we set out to restore near-natural upper extremity control to our military service members who have lost limbs in service of our country,” said Dr. Justin C. Sanchez, director of the Biological Technologies Office at DARPA, in a statement. “The goal is to control the arm as naturally as possible.”
The robotic arm, according to Sanchez, has the same size, weight, shape and grip strength as an adult biological arm.

The army said Matheny had to undergo procedures to “re-map” the nerves in his arm so he could better control the robotic limb. The military did not say what those procedures were or how invasive.

“So far this thing works great,” said Matheny. “It’s the arm of the future. This arm here, it can do 45 pounds. I can take on any one of these big old burley soldiers around here. We’ll get a 45-pound weight and keep going. I can keep going till the battery wears down. And when I feel it starting to go down, I say swap me out. They take it out, pop another battery in, and I keep going. I never miss a beat.”

Sanchez noted that researchers are continuing to push to develop more complex and powerful mind-control solutions for prosthetics and are looking into direct neural interfaces.

That kind of control would require implants in the brain. However, the implants would be able to send and receive signals so users’ would gain “feeling” in their robotic arm.

“If you really want to get to natural control, you have to do this — where we have human subjects have direct neural interfaces in their brain,” Sanchez said. “They can think about moving their robotic arm and the signals come directly out of their brain, process in the arm, and can actually move the arm.”

Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM) : keystone of memory formation

MONTREAL, May 13, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ – Back in 1992, Rapid Eye Movement sleep, or REM, was on everyone’s lips thanks to a now legendary American rock band. Everybody hurts, they sang. For decades, scientists have fiercely debated whether REM sleep – the phase where dreams appear – is directly involved in memory formation.

Now, a study published in Science by researchers at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute (McGill University) and the University of Bern provides evidence that REM sleep does, indeed, play this role – at least in mice.

«We already knew that newly acquired information is stored into different types of memories, spatial or emotional, before being consolidated or integrated», says Sylvain Williams, a researcher and professor of psychiatry at McGill.

«How the brain performs this process has remained unclear – until now. We were able to prove for the first time that REM sleep is indeed critical for normal spatial memory formation in mice », explains Dr. Williams, whose team is also part of the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal research network. Williams co-authored the study with Antoine Adamantidis, a researcher at the University of Bern’s Department of Clinical Research and at the Sleep Wake Epilepsy Center of the Bern University Hospital.

A dream quest
Hundreds of previous studies have tried unsuccessfully to isolate neural activity during REM sleep using traditional experimental methods. In this new study, the researchers used optogenetics, a recently developed technology that enables scientists to target precisely a population of neurons and control its activity by light.

«We chose to target neurons that regulate the activity of the hippocampus, a structure that is critical for memory formation during wakefulness and is known as the “GPS system” of the brain», Williams says.

To test the long-term spatial memory of mice, the scientists trained the rodents to spot a new object placed in a controlled environment where two objects of similar shape and volume stand. Spontaneously, mice spend more time exploring a novel object than a familiar one, showing their use of learning and recall. When these mice were in REM sleep, however, the researchers used light pulses to turn off their memory-associated neurons to determine if it affects their memory consolidation. The next day, the same rodents did not succeed the spatial memory task learned on the previous day. Compared to the control group, their memory seemed erased, or at least impaired.

«Silencing the same neurons for similar durations outside REM episodes had no effect on memory. This indicates that neuronal activity specifically during REM sleep is required for normal memory consolidation», says the study’s lead author Richard Boyce, a PhD student who, ironically, often stayed up all night while performing the experiments.

Implications for brain disease
REM sleep is understood to be a critical component of sleep in all mammals, including humans. Poor sleep-quality is increasingly associated with the onset of various brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

In particular, REM sleep is often significantly perturbed in Alzheimer’s diseases (AD), and results from this study suggest that disruption of REM sleep may contribute directly to memory impairments observed in AD, the researchers say.

This work was partly funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), a postdoctoral fellowship from Fonds de la recherche en Santé du Québec (FRSQ) and an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate scholarship (NSERC).

“Causal Evidence for the Role of REM Sleep Theta Rhythm in Contextual Memory Consolidation”, Science, published 13 may 2016.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad5252

About Dr. Sylvain Williams
Understanding the neural circuits underlying learning and memory is the major research focus of Sylvain Williams, PhD, a member of the Douglas Institute Research Centre since 1999. He is currently full professor of psychiatry at McGill University.

About Richard Boyce
Richard Boyce, lead author of the study supervised by Drs Williams and Adamantidis, conducted his PhD studies through the Integrated Program in Neuroscience (IPN) offered by the McGill University.

About the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal
The Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux (CIUSSS) de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal is made up of the CSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île, the CSSS de Dorval–Lachine–LaSalle, St. Mary’s Hospital, St. Anne’s Hospital, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, West Montreal Readaptation Centre, Grace Dart Extended Care Centre, and Batshaw Youth and Family Centres.

The Douglas Mental Health University Institute is a world-class institute affiliated with McGill University and the World Health Organization. It treats people suffering from mental illness and offers them both hope and healing. Its teams of specialists and researchers are constantly increasing scientific knowledge, integrating this knowledge into patient care, and sharing it with the community in order to educate the public and eliminate prejudices surrounding mental health.

SOURCE Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal