Precise Care for Sleep Disorders
The Center for Personalized Sleep Medicine both develops and tests new approaches to improve precision of sleep disorder diagnosis and treatment. Using Precision Medicine, we work to identify the exact cause of your sleep abnormality and target it particularly for treatment. Our goal is to ensure that optimal sleep—a fundamental necessity for health and well-being—is achievable for everyone.
About Sleep Disorders
If you are having trouble sleeping, the exact cause may vary considerably. Common disorders include:
- Sleep apnea (abnormal breathing during sleep)
- Restless legs syndromes (intense restlessness in the legs and when severe other parts of the body)
- Insomnia (difficult falling or staying asleep)
- Parasomnia (abnormal behaviors during sleep)
- Excessive daytime sleepiness from disorders like narcolepsy
Often, sleep disorder care is standardized to a degree that at least half of patients only see a partial benefit from their treatments. At the Center for Personalized Sleep Medicine, however, we start by measuring various body physiology during sleep and begin to identify how patients have different responses to treatments. We then can determine a comprehensive, personalized plan of care that addresses your trouble sleeping.
Our Work
The Institute is working to expand and grow existing facets of our Pulmonary Division’s Sleep Program in a number of areas, including:
- High loop gain apnea (HLGSA). This relatively new concept has an increasing amount of supportive data. In this condition, unstable breathing control contributes significantly to sleep apnea, and does not respond well to treatment such as positive airway pressure which targets upper airway obstruction. BIDMC’s work provides the conceptual framework for a new disease category (treatment-emergent central sleep apnea), FDA approved therapies for “Complex Sleep Apnea”, a commonly used name for HLGSA, FDA approved software to identify HLGSA, and novel multi-modal therapy approaches for management. However, the vast majority of patients in the US and elsewhere remain poorly treated and do not have access to our methods. Building on our prior work, The Institute will design and implement studies to generate data for new approaches to the treatment of high loop gain sleep apnea.
- Collaborations with Cardiovascular Medicine. The Institute can drive critical collaborations to address sleep physiology and its relationship to heart failure and atrial fibrillation.
- Optimal Sleep. Several dimensions of sleep have been individually associated with health outcomes. These include sleep duration, daytime sleepiness, insomnia, sleep apnea, stability of sleep, sleep blood pressure, sleep timing, and resilience of sleep. We aim to measure multi-component sleep physiology and improve the quality of sleep in an integrated balanced approach.
- Innovative Technology. The Pulmonary Sleep Program has developed the ECG-spectrogram and its variants for sleep and sleep apnea phenotyping (wearable devices and stand-alone software as medical device, FDA approved), an auto continuous positive airway pressure algorithm (FDA approved), and the Positive Airway Pressure Gas Modulator (PAPGAM) device to treat central sleep apnea.
- Innovative clinical concepts. Novel approaches to diagnosis and treatment of hypersomnia and circadian rhythm disorders are in active development.
Meet Our Team
Robert Thomas, MD
Director, Sleep Medicine Center; Sleep Medicine
