Health committee  I'm going to say something very brief, and then I'd like Joyce to maybe expand on that. This is part of a very well thought through initiative started jointly by the NHCC and the Public Health Agency of Canada. We had three years of funding for 18 projects. Mine is just one. Ano

Health committee  I liked your characterization of the magnitude of the problem that's facing us now and a decade or two from now. If we're spending $15 billion a year to treat neurological disorders in the broad sense, and $5 billion of that is due to Alzheimer's alone, and if that multiplies b

Health committee  It's the same story everywhere. Everybody is coming to the same conclusion. What we have here is a disaster in slow motion. Imagine if you were to invest $10 million a year for five or ten years, $50 million to $100 million, and you could reduce a significant chunk of this neurol

Health committee  I like your suggestion of trying to stimulate the research community to help find new ways to address this public health problem. You had asked us for some ballpark figures. I threw out a figure of $5 million. I'd rather see that at $10 million a year for five to ten years.

Health committee  Probably anybody who's an active researcher will say more is better, but we have to be practical and compare it with other major crises that we're facing. Ted, would $10 million a year for five to ten years help you make a difference?

Health committee  Could I answer the question in a similar way but with a different perspective? All day long I work in a research centre that focuses on what determines the health of populations. In most cases it's a combination of a number of factors, so we have to look at biological factors suc

Health committee  I thought you said it better.

Health committee  A second study is being done. This is one of the 18 studies under the PHAC initiative, which is looking at incidence and prevalence by geographic location. We're not involved in that. It's being led, I think, by the University of Calgary. That will directly answer your question i

Health committee  We'll be able to tell you what is known about the causes of Parkinson's, about early symptoms that may not be classical Parkinson's symptoms, about the factors of active aggression. All of those pieces of knowledge are going to be key to designing proper treatments and therapies.

Health committee  One of our big interests in the McLaughlin Centre—and I want to thank R. Samuel McLaughlin for the generous donation that created our centre 12 years ago—is drug safety, efficacy, use, and communication. We're looking at drugs, their effectiveness, adverse health outcomes, and wh

Health committee  Could I just apologize in five seconds to Joyce for not acknowledging the critical role of the NHCC in initiating this initiative and coordinating it with the Public Health Agency? Sorry.

Health committee  Thank you for the chance to speak to that. The project we're doing on a systematic review of these 14 conditions is one of about 15 projects that are part of the PHAC national population health study of neurological conditions. We're looking at what we know at this point in time

Health committee  Not at this scale. Systematic review is the standard now in trying to distill what we know about an issue, but to do 14 times two, because it's onset and progression systematic reviews, is really, I think, a first.

Health committee  I'll mention one that both Ted and I have participated in for the last seven years. It's the concept of a network of centres of excellence where you get a series of centres collaborating. It promotes new research collaborations that hadn't existed. You get this tremendous intelle

Health committee  I could be even more specific and give you some examples of funding levels for NCEs that have sort of a similar level of complexity. PrioNet, which Dr. Fon and I both are a part of, was $35 million for the first seven years, so $5 million a year. We had a plan for a larger progr