A Dyadic Sleep Intervention for Alzheimer's Disease Patients and Their Caregivers

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Project Summary/Abstract Yeonsu Song, PhD, RN, FNP-C is an Assistant Professor at School of Nursing at UCLA with join appointment at David Geffen School of Medicine. She is fully committed to becoming an independently funded investigator specializing in sleep in individuals with cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and their caregivers. She has a particular interest in testing a dyadic sleep intervention program for AD patients and their informal caregivers. Career development and training plan: During this 1-year extended K award, Dr. Song will continue to work with her mentors to complete training activities disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic related restrictions. Core training activities will include (1) refining skills necessary to deliver a dyadic sleep intervention program both in in-person and telehealth delivery modalities, (2) enhancing skills in recruitment, particularly using virtual strategies, (3) obtaining new knowledge of associations between inflammation and sleep among Alzheimer’s caregivers by analyzing her research study data, and (4) refining career development skills. The mentoring team is comprised of Drs. Jennifer Martin (expert in behavioral sleep interventions), Cathy Alessi (expert in sleep medicine), Michael Irwin (expert in inflammatory factors), and Edmond Teng (expert in assessment of AD). She will continue to draw on resources available at UCLA and the VAGLAHS. Her training plan features carefully curated coursework and hands-on training experiences, all aligned with her training goals. Research plan: This extended funding will ensure Dr. Song to successfully achieve all study aims as planned in her original proposal. In Stage 1A (Aim 1), she already iteratively refined and finalized the dyadic sleep intervention program targeting both members of the dyad (patients and caregivers). In Stage 1B (Aims 2-4), she has been pilot-testing the program effects by assessing sleep, health, and quality of life in both members of the group using a small randomized controlled trial design. The dyadic sleep intervention program consists of one hour, 5 weekly sessions, which include manualized sleep hygiene recommendations and a behavioral sleep intervention including sleep compression therapy. A unique aspect of the proposed work is that the program is tailored to address sleep problems of both patients and caregivers, and includes upstream inflammatory biomarkers among caregivers to evaluate a key mechanism of intervention benefits that can be further explored in future research. Over the past years, she has randomized 25 dyads in this study. During the extended award, Dr. Song will randomize additional 15 dyads thus, analyze the data of 40 dyads. Skills developed from executing all training and research plan will enable Dr. Song to become an independent researcher and a leader in research on managing sleep in AD patients and their caregivers, with the goal of improving their health and quality of life.