Tag Archives: sleep

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CaHRU sleep research cited in UK parliamentary briefings on Sleep and Health

Sleep and healthResearch from CaHRU was cited in the recently published parliamentary briefing on Sleep and Health and Sleep and Long-term Health. The briefing was issued as a POSTnote from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology and cited CAHRU’s work on primary care for insomnia including the Resources for Effective Sleep Treatment (REST) website. Professor Graham Law and Niro Siriwardena met with one of the co-authors Lev Tankelevitch earlier this year to discuss their work.

Sleep and longterm healthThe briefing on Sleep and Health also cites two systematic reviews led by CaHRU’s Dr Coral Sirdifield on patient and general practitioner (GP) perceptions of the problems of benzodiazepine sleeping pills, an article by Prof Siriwardena providing guidance for GPs, and the OASIS trial (led by Prof Dan Freeman of Oxford University) showing the effects of treatment using digital Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (dCBTi) on psychiatric symptoms. The briefing on Sleep and Long-term Health  research papers on sleep assessment and the DIALS trial showing the effect of dCBTI on quality of life which is due for publication this autumn.

rest-logoThe REST project is also explicitly mentioned: ‘One strategy to improve training for healthcare professionals is through online training developed by the Resources for Effective Sleep Treatment project’ and the REST e-learning programme for GPs and healthcare staff has been accessed over 16,000 times by users in over 160 countries.

POSTnotes are distributed in paper copies to Parliamentarians, placed in the reference libraries of both Houses of Parliament and also promoted via social media using Twitter @POST_UK. CaHRU are currently collaborating in a major trial of sleep restriction therapy in primary care, the HABIT trial. You can find out more about our work on sleep from our infographic on ‘Sleep and Insomnia‘.

By Prof Niro Siriwardena

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CaHRU presents research on sleep at college summer showcase

BrayfordThe annual research showcase, featuring speakers from the College of Social Science took place on 6 June 2018. Professor Niro Siriwardena presented on CaHRU’s work on sleep. Sleep is fundamental to our wellbeing, from birth to old age. Poor sleep affects health, sickness, life, death, productivity, and the wider economy. Sleep is as important to health as other lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise but, compared to these, is under-researched and under-invested in. There are effective psychological treatments for insomnia but these are not widely available, whereas less effective and potentially harmful drug treatments are commonly used.

CSSsummershowcase2He described the work of members of CaHRU together with partners at the University of Lincoln and other academic institutions (Oxford, Manchester, Glasgow, Ghent), in partnership with service users, staff and healthcare organisations, locally, nationally and internationally. Over the past 15 years, using systematic reviews, observational and qualitative studies, quasi-experiments and trials, staff in CaHRU have explored the problem of primary care for sleep, how this might be improved, and what effect this is having on sleep, prescribing, and health outcomes.

INB2The work has led to a major multicentre trial, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (£1.8M), investigating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of sleep restriction therapy, a behavioural treatment for insomnia, delivered in primary care. These studies and the wider impacts of this work were presented to those present.

 

[su_document url=”https://communityandhealth.dev.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2018/07/Sleep_Siriwardena.pdf” width=”660″]Multi-morbidity, goal-oriented care, the community and equity[/su_document]

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Professor Graham Law gives inaugural lecture on ‘Sleep, sugar and statistics’ to a packed audience

GrahamLawinauguralProfessor Graham Law delivered his inaugural lecture on 30 January 2018 to a full audience of members of academic staff and the general public. The lecture included an outline of Graham’s academic career from posts at York and Leeds Universities to his current professorship at the University of Lincoln where he is a senior member of the Community and Health Research Unit and School of Health and Social Care. During the course of his career, Graham has published almost 100 research papers, many of which have been highly cited, including papers in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine and American Journal of Epidemiology.

brayfordnight750The lecture continued with a discussion of what epidemiology is, and its origin’s with Dr John Snow’s discovery that cholera is waterborne, through his removal of the water pump handle at Broad Street in the Soho area of London which halted the epidemic. Graham spoke about his groundbreaking work on functional data analysis which involves complex analysis of large longitudinal data over time. This has included studies on a huge range of topics including the epidemiology of diabetes, sleep, gastrointestinal and a variety of other conditions. He has also supervised 10 doctoral students to completion of their PhD and has run programmes in epidemiological statistics at Leeds University, for medical and master’s students. More recently he has been investigating the relationship between poor sleep and the risk of developing diabetes.

Desk1Another aspect of Graham’s work which was very evident during his entertaining and informative lecture was his interest in increasing the public understanding of science. He has done his through engaging in many public lectures, television, radio and popular books such as his recent publication with Dr Shane Pascoe, ‘Sleep Better: The Science and the Myths’. Graham ended by explaining why he loved Lincoln University – his new colleagues, the lack of bureacracy and the ambition of Lincoln to develop as a world-class university.

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CaHRU brings together Lincoln sleep researchers for LIH seminar

Professor Niro Siriwardena led the recent Lincoln Institute for Health (LIH) research development seminar entitled, ‘Things that go bump in the night’: exploring the problem of tinnitus and sleep.

This seminar brought together researchers at the University of Lincoln with a common interest in sleep research to explore interdisciplinary research into insomnia. Several research centres, groups and experts from a number of disciplines are members of the LIH and each have a record of funded studies investigating sleep and insomnia in a variety of conditions. The work builds on the University of Lincoln’s 4* impact case study on insomnia from REF2014.

 

The seminar focused on how to combine different research approaches to explore how the team might improve the management of insomnia linked to tinnitus. This began with presentations from each participant on their experience and current work in this field:

  • Niro, who is professor of primary and prehospital care, began by describing CaHRU’s translational research focus, seeking to improve health care processes and outcomes. A key area has been in primary care for people with insomnia which includes systematic reviews, qualitative studies and the development and evaluation of psychological interventions for insomnia.
  • WordItOut-word-cloud-2565244Prof Alina Rodriguez, professor in psychology, presented her approach combining methodological strategies including psychological, epidemiological, and molecular to understand the development of behavioural, cognitive, emotional or physical problems across the lifespan, seeking to identify factors amenable to change that can be translated into public health policy or interventions.
  • Prof Graham Law is professor in medical statistics and has worked extensively in epidemiology and medical statistics, focussing on sleep and the consequences of good and poor sleep on metabolic and cardiovascular health.
  • Dr Simon Durrant, senior lecturer in psychology, initially trained as a musician (counter tenor) before developing his expertise in the cognitive neuroscience of sleep. He leads the sleep lab at Lincoln using techniques such as polysomnography, EEG and actigraphy to understand the physiological basis of sleep and its disorders.

The group then discussed, together and with other academics present, the problem of tinnitus (noise generated internally in the body) which affects around 10% of adults and is associated with insomnia in over three-quarters of those with the condition, particularly causing difficulty getting off to sleep (so-called sleep latency). There followed an exploration of potential ways to investigate the problem of insomnia linked to tinnitus (e.g. using evidence synthesis, analysis of large datasets, and qualitative designs) together with the potential for intervention develop (e.g. using CBT for insomnia together with CBT for tinnitus) and evaluation of these.

The seminar ended with suggestions and proposals for how to take this work forward.

[su_document url=”https://communityandhealth.dev.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2017/11/Tinnitus_insomnia_finalrevised.pdf” responsive=”no”]Multi-morbidity, goal-oriented care, the community and equity[/su_document]

A. N. Siriwardena

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‘Tribulations and trials in primary care insomnia’ at BSS 2017

brighton_metropole This year’s British Sleep Society (BSS) conference, held in Brighton at the Hilton Metropole, featured an invited presentation from Prof Niro Siriwardena, director of CaHRU, entitled ‘Tribulations and trials in primary care insomnia’.

After a welcome to the conference by Professor Mary Morell, President of the BSS, the opening keynote was given by Professor Franco Cappuccio, from the University of Warwick on the topic of ‘Healthy sleep’. This was followed by the opening session of the conference on ‘Sleep and health’ chaired by Professor Graham Law, secretary of the BSS and a member of CaHRU. This session included three presentations. The first was on ‘Sleep and chronic pain: moving from association to causation?’ give by Dr John brighton_peopleMcBeth, Reader at the University of Manchester. He described the bidirectional relationship between chronic pain and sleep, with pain giving rise to insomnia and sleep disturbance exacerbating or even causing pain. Studies had shown that treating insomnia in people with chronic pain, for example due to fibromyalgia led to improvements in wellbeing and quality of life but no improvement in pain.

Prof Siriwardena next talked about how he had initially developed an interest in the problem of insomnia through initial research into use of sleeping tablets by general practitioners. ‘Tribulations and trials in primary care insomnia’ went on to describe the studies that showed that hypnotic drugs like benzodiazepines and z-drugs though often prescribed for insomnia did more harm than good, and that primary care trials of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) showed positive effects. He went on to describe the work on the Resources for Effective Sleep Treatment (REST) project, a quality improvement project which successfully implemented CBT-I in general practice which led to reduced hypnotic prescribing in those practices. Because of the low uptake of CBT-I in primary care, there was increasing evidence that online or self-help CBT-I was effective with similar effect sizes to face-to-face individual or group therapy. Finally he presented the evidence on short behavioural therapies such as sleep restriction therapy including a forthcoming HTA funded trial led by Oxford University’s Simon Kyle and involving the Universities of Manchester (Peter Bower) and Lincoln (Niro Siriwardena).

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The final talk in the session was Dr Eleanor Scott, Senior Lecturer at Leeds University and Consultant Diabetologist at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, who spoke on Sleep and metabolic health, describing the relationship between insomnia and diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. This was followed by Dr Jason Rihel,of University College London discussing his work on sleep in zebrafish and Dr Claire Sexton of Oxford University on her work on sleep related to dementia. Brighton was an excellent setting for a well-attended BSS conference.

By Niro Siriwardena