Sleep and Neurodevelopment Service

National Institute Of Mental Health

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

This past year we saw fewer patients due to COVID-19 and the Sleep and Neurodevelopmental Service scheduled 71 studies across 9 institutes. We have collected sleep data on several distinct cohorts including children with childhood onset schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, autism, McCune Albright Syndrome, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Sickle Cell Disease, Neurofibromatosis, as well as for people with various disorders of neurodevelopment with both known and unknown genetic causes. We are working with our collaborators to try to identify unique sleep signals that help define the disorders under study and therefore outline paths for potential therapeutic intervention. Some of our earliest work, looking at sleep in children with autism, helped us understand that there is a lot of information in the way the brain sleeps and that sleep neurophysiology also contains important information about the way the brain matures. We recently published our findings showing that in a large cohort of children with autism, sleep markers, called spindles, were reduced compared to children with typical development and also reduced when compared to children with developmental delays who did not also have autism. This work suggests that some markers only found in sleep, might be related to behavioral differences in children. These findings highlight the importance of looking at the sleeping brain during development for some of the earliest clues regarding neurodevelopmental disorders. Yet, considerable gaps in knowledge still exist in our understanding of sleep measurements and how these change during the early periods of brain development. Filling in these gaps may aid in the earliest identification of mental health disorders. We work closely with the Neurodevelopmental and Behavioral Phenotyping Service to best associate changes in the sleeping brain to neurodevelopmental stages in typical and atypical neurodevelopment. A major focus of the research arm of the Service is to develop a comprehensive battery of sleep measurements as a mainstay of clinical assessment of children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders. Through our efforts with researchers from many different disciplines, we hope to create and initiate standardized protocols for collecting sleep data on children. The online summary of our efforts to promote Electrophysiologic Sleep Phenotyping (ESP) as a mainstay of the clinical assessment of children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders can be found at the following link: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/events/2017/sleep-and-neurodevelopment-workshop-electrophysiologic-sleep-phenotyping-esp.shtml. The prospective longitudinal ESP evaluation, including comprehensive behavioral assessment of children with typical development and those at risk for neuropsychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorders, opened recruitment in the summer of 2021. We will use electrical sleep patterns recorded from the brain to help identify normal and abnormal neurodevelopmental trajectories at the earliest possible opportunity in order to help us develop comprehensive treatment strategies. Research was conducted under protocol NCT01778504.