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Bradley Hospital to open nation's first pediatric sleep, mental health center

Providence Journal - 5/7/2021

EAST PROVIDENCE — The nation’s first center devoted to pediatric sleep and its impact on the metal health of children and adolescents is being established at Bradley Hospital, parent health system Lifespan has announced.

A $10-million grant from the National Institutes of Health will help build the center, according to Lifespan.

The eventual goal is to “develop new strategies to facilitate healthy sleep patterns that improve children’s physical, cognitive and emotional well-being,” Sen. Jack Reed, one of the new center’s supporters, said in a news release.

The Center for Sleep and Circadian Rhythms in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, as the new center will be called, will be led by Mary A. Carskadon, Bradley’s director of chronobiology and sleep research. Her resumé includes four books and more than 165 articles on pediatric sleep issues in peer-reviewed publications. Carskadon is a professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

“Links between mental illness and sleep are indisputable; probing and identifying the links from sleep and circadian rhythms to pediatric mental illness and mental health can identify important pathways to prevention and early intervention, not the least because these factors are amenable to behavioral change and to defined therapeutic targeting,” Carskadon said.

According to Lifespan, initial research will unfold in three phases:

First, the center will “assess in primary-school children from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds how green-space use impacts sleep and mental health.”

Second, researchers will “use an intensive sleep and chronobiology approach along with neuroimaging to determine how sleepiness and memory in early adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are affected by sleep bioregulatory factors.”

Third, scientists will “use a prospective approach to query the roles of sleep patterns and circadian timing in the progression of bipolar Illness in children and early adolescents.”

The $10-million grant is through the NIH’s Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, or COBRE, program.

“The ultimate goal,” said Carskadon, “to ease the burden of these issues for children, adolescents and their families through enhancing the research workforce and capabilities. ... This COBRE aims to build a bridge from the sleep and circadian knowledge base and research methods to the outstanding mental-health research and clinical care that characterize Bradley Hospital.”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Bradley Hospital to open nation's first pediatric sleep, mental health center

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