Peter Hedlin (PhD, MD) recalls being a 'young, naïve medical student' when he asked a mentor a question that's stuck with him for years.

"I remember asking how anaesthetics work on the brain," said Hedlin. "And he said, 'we actually don't really know'. And I thought that was crazy."

Today, Hedlin is an anesthesiologist and clinician scientist at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine. He examines what surgery and sedation do to the human body — in particular, to aging brains.

Trained first as a microbiologist who earned his PhD as a vaccine researcher at VIDO (Vaccine and Infections Disease Organization), Hedlin was always drawn to medicine. He gravitated toward helping patients one-on-one, and loved the immediate feedback of operating‑room decisions.

"I love to see immediate consequences of actions and anesthesia's perfect for that," he said. "Some people hate being in hospitals, but I love it."

In this episode, Hedlin unpacks post‑operative delirium: the "loopiness" many people feel a day or two after surgery. Most of the grogginess eventually wears off, but for those over age 60, it can persist.

In older adults, cognitive dysfunction may appear as visible agitation, as patients hallucinate or pull out intravenous lines following surgery. Conversely, it can be easier to miss when patients enter a quieter, hypoactive state, withdrawing and not talking as much.

That 'acute brain failure' can last weeks, months, even years. It's linked to longer hospital stays, higher short‑term mortality and a greater chance of ending up in long‑term care.

"We don't have a great understanding why that happens," said Hedlin. "I'd love to make care for our elderly patients better, and we know cognitive dysfunction in the surgical period is common."

Hedlin says that work begins before long the patient's surgery date. Along with nursing managers, psychiatric and geriatric specialists, he's piloting a screening tool to assess older patients for frailty and cognitive risk. He asks patients to bring along a friend or a family member, who knows their baseline, to assist with daily delirium checks before and after the operation.

"When we can identify these patients several weeks before their surgery, then it gives potentially an opportunity to intervene and optimise that patient prior to their their surgical event," he said.

Hedlin is also participating in larger, randomized studies, and is watching developments in other parts of the country with interest.

But Hedlin also points to simple fixes hospital staff can make, such as returning patients' hearing aids and glasses, and ensuring older patients get a good night's sleep after surgery.

"Just returning people to as normal a situation as possible is really quite helpful for reorienting them in that post-operative period," he said.

In this episode, medical student and researcher Vaidehee Lanke shares what large provincial datasets reveal about opioid use disorder, maternal mental health, and pregnancy.

Armed with data, she hopes better support —before, during, and after birth—can change outcomes for mothers and babies.

Lanke spent her summer working with epidemiologist Dr. Nadeem Muhajarine and the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit on a pan-Canadian project tracking opioid use in perinatal populations across five provinces.

"The question we set out to answer was: What is the association between opioid use disorder and perinatal mental health conditions?" Lanke said. Opioids in excess are linked to maternal death, stillbirth, and poor fetal growth.

Using hospital discharge records, ambulatory care data, and physicians' billing data from 2016-2024, Muhajarine's team is assembling a provincial cohort of pregnant patients to study when, and how often opioid use disorder and mental health challenges collide.

"It's like that critical thinking piece, like how to look at massive amounts of data and make sense of it," said Lanke, who earned her masters in epidemiology at McGill before returning home to Saskatoon to attend medical school.\

"Sometimes [with code] you're poring over it, and it's like that little comma or like, you know, semi colon, that makes all that difference."

Lanke calls strong public health the 'backbone' of medicine. She sees computational biology as a way to pinpoint when and where to intervene more effectively with high-risk mothers and infants.

"This was a dream project for me, because it brought together all my different worlds," she said.

As a student, Jack Walther's friends often came to him when they needed a listening ear, or help with relationship struggles.

This summer, Walther took his fascination with the brain and mood disorders to Dr. Darrell Mousseau's psychiatry laboratory, learning to untangle some of the tiny molecular threads that might explain why depression so often shows up alongside dementia.

Walther and the research team dug into the physical interactions between serotonin and the beta amyloid peptides that build up in patients with Alzheimer's disease. .

He admits going from the classroom to the laboratory felt like a sharp learning curve.

"It was totally different," he said. "It's daunting once you get onto it, but once you get going, it makes a lot more sense and you feel way more comfortable."

Using human embryonic kidney cells, Walther and lab staff used cross-linking chemicals to literally 'catch' proteins interacting.

In this episode, Walther recalls the day Mousseau hustled into the lab, results in hand.

"I could see the excitement in his face and it just made kind of the lab buzz a little," said Walther. "We found there is actually some kind of physical interaction between these beta amyloids and the serotonin receptor."

Mousseau's laboratory is narrowing down biochemical events common to depression and Alzheimer's disease, looking for modifiable targets in the depressed brain that could slow or delay the onset of the neurodegenerative disorder.

Walther said being part of that laboratory work felt 'incredible'.

"I want to bring some good into this world," he said. "I would like to focus on people that struggle to help themselves. Whether that's neurodegenerative or it's people that are just stuck in place and don't know what to do."

He aims to earn his honours degree in neuroscience, then keep pressing on.

"Whichever way that takes me, that's when I'll be happy with what I've accomplished," Walther said.