A rotten night's rest makes anyone moody. For kids, sleep problems can be a more serious precursor to anxiety and depression. As a researcher and clinician who helps adolescents struggling with these disorders, Dana McMakin wants to know if worrying at bedtime interferes with the brain’s routine ability to process and permanently store emotional memories during sleep. And if this, in turn, causes difficulty regulating emotions. To find out, she’s taking an up-close look inside anxious kids’ sleeping brains.
At Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, McMakin’s leading a National Institute of Mental Health-funded project with FIU neuroscientist Aaron Mattfeld that’s following 200 kids with anxiety from 9-13 to 18 years of age.
A combination of questionnaires, MRI scans and polysomnography — gold-standard technology that measures brain waves, eye movements and breathing — is providing a detailed picture into how exactly stress alters sleep physiology (i.e. REM sleep neurophysiology). Physiological differences are already emerging in the data.
This data is critical to pinpointing the right interventions. McMakin’s also getting a new collaboration off the ground with Harvard and University of Pittsburgh researchers. The NIMH-supported Pediatric Precision Sleep Network aims to identify sleep “fingerprints” that could predict mental health risks during this pivotal developmental period and develop screening tools for primary care providers.
“Of all the things that put you at risk for mental health problems — trauma, genetics, family environment — there’s a lot that’s hard to change. But sleep? It’s easy to modify. If we can find out what’s going on physiologically that impacts sleep, then we can pinpoint how and when to intervene.”
Dana McMakin
Professor, College of Arts, Sciences & Education, Center for Children and Families; Licensed clinical psychologist, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital