Clinical Associate Professor
Division: Otolaryngology
Active Staff: St. Paul’s Hospital
City : Vancouver
Hospital Authority : Providence Health Care
Clinical Office Address:
ENT Clinic, St. Paul’s Hospital
1081 Burrard Street
Vancouver, BC V6Z 1Y6
Clinical interests: Hearing loss, cochlear implants, bone conduction hearing implants, skull base tumours, congenital sensorineural hearing loss, graduate and post-graduate teaching
Research interest: healthy aging, dementia, cognitive decline, public health, epidemiology
Publication record: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=T1Miw10AAAAJ&hl=en
Dr. Mick is a pediatric and adult neurotologist (i.e., a sub-specialist ear, nose and throat surgeon) who treats diseases of the ear and skull base. He is a surgeon in the B.C. provincial cochlear implant program whose practice is based at St. Paul’s Hospital and B.C. Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.
Dr. Mick’s research focuses on the epidemiology of sensory losses. He documented the prevalence of age-related hearing and vision disorders in Canada and showed that hearing and vision losses are associated with cardiometabolic diseases, social isolation and cognitive decline in older adults. His work suggested that the link between sensory loss and cognitive decline is unlikely to be significantly mediated by social isolation, and that APOE e4 (the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease) is not associated with hearing or vision losses. In 2024, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) awarded him a grant to further investigate genetic factors that might explain sensory-cognitive associations.
Dr. Mick works to improve access to hearing health care. He was an important part of a team that introduced universal newborn screening for congenital cytomegalovirus to the province of Saskatchewan, which led to earlier treatments (including hearing interventions) for babies affected by the virus. At the other end of the age spectrum, Dr. Mick helped develop protocols and educational materials to improve the management of sensory losses in long-term care facilities.
Dr. Mick has received many CIHR grants to support his work and is a researcher in the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA), Canada’s premiere hub for research on neurodegenerative disorders of aging. He is a member of the Data Access Committee of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.