The Sleeps Disorders Clinic
The IMHR Sleep Research Laboratory is a 4-bed research space that is shared with Dr. Verner Knott’s Neurophysiology / EEG laboratory. We also are fortunate to have Dr. Joseph DeKoninck, Professor Emeritus at the University of Ottawa School of Psychology, associated with our Laboratory.
Dr. DeKoninck’s presence allows us to host honours students in 4th year undergraduate psychology for honours thesis projects in sleep research. In some rare cases, Master’s and PhD students may work in this area as well.
Our research is largely clinical. We have presented papers on chronic insomnia, the mis-diagnosis of narcolepsy patients as schizophrenic, and heartbeat irregularities in sleep apnea; these studies are in collaboration with The Royal’s clinical sleep laboratory.
We are also conducting basic pharmacology research into the control of eye movements (EMs) in Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM sleep), where most of the night’s dreaming occurs. This is because most depressed patients have a considerable excess of EMs and a too-rapid onset of REM sleep in the night, the exact cause of which is not yet known.
EM’s are triggered by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and can be reliably suppressed by drugs that augment the neurotransmitters serotonin and / or noradrenaline (norepinephrine). We are using drug probes for these neurotransmitters to explore this complex system — currently galantamine, buspirone, and placebo in a double-blind human study that has been approved by our local Research Ethics Board and by Health Canada. This study is expected to terminate in 2012.
Depending on the results of the above study, our long-term goal is to create similar tests to predict treatment response in depressed patients, or perhaps even the risk of future depression in family members who are currently not affected.