Gail M. Eyssen MD
Dr McKeown-Eyssen received her doctorate in epidemiology from McGill University, Montreal, in 1975. As an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics until 1979, she participated in studies of occupational health including health effects of asbestos exposure and of methyl mercury exposure in northern Quebec.
She joined the University of Toronto in 1979 and retired from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in 2009. There, her primary research was on the relationship of diet to colon cancer and other solid tumours and the biological mechanisms involved. Through a cross-appointment in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, she also collaborated in studies of dietary factors associated with diabetes.
Her interest in Multiple Chemical Sensitivity began in 1989 when she was invited by the Ontario Ministry of Health to join the Minister’s Advisory Committee on Environmental Hypersensitivity where she served until 1992. She was a member of the Clinical Research Advisory Board on Environmental Hypersensitivity for the Ontario Ministry of Health from 1992-2000 and a member of the Environmental Hypersensitivities Advisory Committee for the Laboratory Centre for Disease Control, Health Canada from 1998-2001. She was the Principal Investigator for the Environmental Hypersensitivity Research Unit funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health from 1993-1998. She and her colleagues developed a reproducible questionnaire to assess all features of MCS which had been included in the seven case definitions then in use and identified those which were best able to discriminate between patients most and least likely to have MCS. Using the optimal case definition, the group investigated several biological hypotheses in a series of case-control studies and identified several genes associated with MCS.