Ryan Muir

Dr. Muir completed his Medical Degree and Residency in Adult Neurology at the University of Toronto. He completed fellowship training in Vascular Neurology in the Calgary Stroke Program and a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary. Dr. Muir’s research work focuses on vascular cognitive impairment. His thesis was on characterizing the plasma biomarkers of Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy – a neurovascular and neurodegenerative disease that often co-occurs with Alzheimer’s Disease and is a cause of hemorrhagic stroke and dementia. Dr. Muir has received a Canadian Institute of Health Graduate Scholarship, the Denyse-Lajoie Lake Brain Fellowship from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and Alzheimer’s Society Research Program awards to support his fellowship and research training.

He has been recruited to Sunnybrook and will focus his research on stroke and vascular cognitive disorders. Dr. Muir is motivated to advance discovery and treatments for patients with hemorrhagic stroke and CAA. Dr. Muir aims to establish the Toronto Intracerebral Hemorrhage (TICH) cohort – a multi-centre longitudinal cohort who are well characterized with cognitive, neuroimaging, and plasma biomarker assessments; followed longitudinally; and linked to provincial administrative datasets to characterize the predictors of mortality and hemorrhage recurrence. TICH will also capture patients with CAA and, together with collaborations with Toronto Dementia Research Alliance affiliates and cognitive neurology clinics, Dr. Muir also plans to establish a city-wide cohort of patients with CAA. This cohort may serve as a foundation for future clinical trial development and international collaborations with other experts in CAA globally.

Furthermore, with the advent of new amyloid-targeting immunotherapy agents for those with Alzheimer’s Disease, there is a concern that those with concomitant CAA should not receive such therapies given the risk of hemorrhage. Thus, Dr. Muir plans to investigate novel applications of plasma biomarkers of CAA in patient’s with Alzheimer’s Disease and whether this may help facilitate further risk stratification.

Dr. Muir’s longer term plan, in collaboration with other local experts in vascular cognitive impairment at Sunnybrook, is to establish a program for applications of emerging collaborative clinical trials in cerebral small vessel disease.