Sleep Resource Core

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Timing, content, and duration of sleep are important for multiple physiological functions, including response to stress; body composition; neurological, cardiovascular, reproductive, and metabolic function; cognition; and mental health. Poor sleep can be both a cause and an outcome of disease: for example, poor sleep adversely affects health, particularly cardiometabolic health and cognitive processing, and many diseases/syndromes disrupt sleep. These potentially bidirectional associations are particularly salient in women, in whom insomnia prevalence rises with age, and in whom vasomotor “hot flashes” can disturb the sleep of peri- and postmenopausal women, thereby exacerbating stress and adverse health and cognitive outcomes, including susceptibility to dementia. A full understanding of women’s health therefore requires consideration of sleep as potential modifying and mediating factors, especially since there are wide inter-individual variations in self- selected sleep timing and duration. One innovation of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School Center for Stress and Neural Regulation of Reproductive Aging Health Outcomes program is to include objective sleep metrics from complementary modalities in all experimental projects, including relevant projects funded through the Career Enhancement Core (CEC), thereby promoting interdisciplinary, collaborative, synergistic, and translational work. Building on our experience as national resources for many other NIH- supported research grants, the Sleep Resource Core (SRC) will collaborate with and be integrated into all Projects and the CEC by providing sleep-related expertise, equipment, and analyses. For human experimental studies, we will use wrist actigraphy and an online diary with questionnaires administered once or twice a day. The SRC will purchase, calibrate, and maintain actigraphy devices, as well as download, store, and process actigraphy data. We will manually clean and score actigraphy data and apply validated algorithms to extract quantitative measures. The online diary includes algorithms that perform real-time error checking, thereby increasing accuracy and decreasing data inconsistencies and data cleaning efforts. For mouse projects, the SRC will perform the surgeries and conduct and score polysomnographic sleep recordings. These objective and subjective sleep data will be used by each project to address their specific aims. The SRC will also (i) train and support staff in human and animal projects (including CEC Scholars and Pilot projects), ensuring high quality data collection; (ii) work actively with the CEC to provide data and expertise for CEC projects and train early investigators in sleep science; (iii) assist with the interpretation and integration of both subjective and objective sleep metrics with other exposures and covariates for all projects; and (iv) participate in manuscript preparation and results dissemination. Sleep data and analysis tools will be made available on the National Sleep Research Resource website. The SRC will be an integral and synergistic SCORE component by providing resources, equipment, expertise, and sleep data to all Projects and Cores.