Dr Cindy Calkin wins Best Paper Award

Dr. Cindy Calkin is a clinical researcher and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Neuroscience at Dalhousie University, Canada. She is the Medical Director of a unique multidisciplinary clinical research Mood and Metabolism Program that includes psychiatry, endocrinology and metabolism, health physics, biomedical engineering, neuroradiology, and medical neuroscience. Her group uses multimodal testing to collect detailed prospective data. Her innovation and discovery research focuses on mechanisms underlying Treatment-Resistant Bipolar Depression (TRBD) and novel mechanism-based targeted treatments. The first mechanism underlying TRBD that her group discovered is metabolic in nature. More than half of all bipolar patients have insulin resistance or type-2-diabetes (IR/T2DM) and this is associated with chronic course and poor response to mood stabilizing treatment, with psychiatric morbidity increasing 12-fold following the onset of IR. It is a novel concept to treat an underlying metabolic disorder to improve a psychiatric one. 

Read all about Dr Calkin’s award at: Paul Wender Best Paper in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry