Eric Brown

Eric Brown is a psychiatrist, teacher and researcher working at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in geriatric psychiatry. He completed his medical degree at McMaster University and his psychiatric residency at the University of Toronto. He subsequently completed a graduate degree with the Institute of Medical Science and a fellowship in geriatric psychiatry. His research training and interests include using neuroimaging (positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging) to explore the pathophysiology of psychiatric symptoms and disorders including depression and cognitive impairment. He is exploring the potential role of environmental exposures on the development of dementia. He is also interested in open source data, statistical analysis and reproducibility in psychiatric research and is the author and maintainer of open source R packages supporting psychiatric research. Clinically, he works primarily on a geriatric inpatient psychiatry unit at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and supervises clinical trainees.

Research Synopsis

Dr. Brown’s research interests include exploring the pathophysiology of cognitive decline using multimodal neuroimaging approaches including positron emission tomography. He is interested in maximizing the clinical and research utility of available technologies, and in open and reproducible analytic approaches. He is exploring the potential contribution of environmental exposures to the pathophysiology of cognitive impairment. He uses meta-analytic techniques to quantitatively summarize the literature. 

Recent Publications

1. Brown EE, Rashidi-Ranjbar N, Caravaggio F, Gerretsen P, Pollock BG, Mulsant BH, Rajji TK, Fischer CE, Flint A, Mah L, Herrmann N, Bowie CR, Voineskos AN, Graff-Guerrero A. Brain Amyloid PET Tracer Delivery is Related to White Matter Integrity in Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment. Journal of Neuroimaging. 2019 July 3.
2. Brown EE, Shah P, Pollock BG, Gerretsen P, Graff-Guerrero A. Lead (Pb) in Alzheimer's Dementia: A Systematic Review of Human Case-Control Studies. Curr Alzheimer Res. 2019;16(4):353-361. 
3. Brown EE. tacmagic: Positron emission tomography analysis in R. J of Open Source Software. 2019 Feb 27. 4(34), 1281. 
4. Brown EE, Gerretsen P, Pollock B, Graff-Guerrero A. Psychiatric benefits of lithium in water supplies may be due to protection from the neurotoxicity of lead exposure. Med Hypotheses. 2018 Jun;115:94-102.
5. Brown EE, Graff-Guerrero A, Houle S, Mizrahi R, Wilson AA, Pollock BG, Mulsant BH, Felsky D, Voineskos AN, Tang-Wai DF, Verhoeff NP, Freedman M, Ismail Z, Chow TW. Amyloid deposition in semantic dementia: a positron emission tomography study. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2016 Sep;31(9):1064-74. 
6. Brown EE, Iwata Y, Chung JK, Gerretsen P, Graff-Guerrero A. Tau in Late-Life Depression: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. J Alzheimers Dis. 2016 Sep 6;54(2):615-33.
    

Honours and Awards

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Dr. Allan Kaplan Graduate Award (2018)

Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2018-2019)

Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship (2017-2018)