PROVIDENCE – Researchers at Butler Hospital and the Providence VA Medical Center have received a $2.24 million federal grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the potential impact of sleep disruption on patients who are at a high risk of suicide.
Led by Michael F. Armey, a research psychologist at Butler and associate professor of research in the psychiatry and human behavior department at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and Melanie Bozzay, a postdoctoral fellow at the Warren Alpert Medical School and health science specialist at the Providence VA, the nearly four-year study will monitor 200 psychiatric patients after their discharge from a hospital.
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Participants will wear a sleep monitor and answer questions sent to their phones in order to give researchers a clearer idea of patients’ physical and mental states as it relates to sleeping patterns.
Patients will also be assessed one, three and six months after their hospital discharge date.
“Modeling the complex process by which atypical sleep impacts daily functioning in conjunction with established proximal risk factors can aid in identifying contexts and time periods of greatest suicidal risk, modeled at the individual level,” Bozzay said.
She and Armey have done previous research into how “atypical” sleep relates to high-risk psychiatric patients’ vulnerability to suicide. The upcoming study is designed to help analyze how atypical sleep affects cognitive performance, impulsiveness, sensitivity to loss and ability to regulate emotions, as well as when these effects occur in relation to irregular sleep patterns.
“While we know who, in general, is at risk for suicide, such as people with mental illnesses, older adults, men, veterans and others, these are huge groups, and even in people identified at risk, the chance of any one individual dying by suicide remains low,” Armey said. “So, we can use proximal predictors of risk – in the case of this study, technology, to monitor sleep and affective behavioral and cognitive predictors of suicide risk in the real world.”
Elizabeth Graham is a PBN contributing writer.
