Current Projects
SWAN Sleep Study II – Michigan Center
Sleep disruptions increase during mid-life in women, due in part to the effects of age, but also possibly due to the menopausal transition -- changes in hormones, symptoms, and bleeding that occur during these years. The current Sleep II study will extend longitudinally the currently-funded, multi-site, multi-ethnic cross-sectional Sleep I study of sleep in midlife women.
For Sleep I, field-based examinations were conducted with 370 midlife pre-, peri- and post-menopausal Caucasian, African-American, and Chinese women from four of the seven study sites from the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation. Sleep I used in-home polysomnography, daily diaries and actigraphs, and self-report sleep questionnaires.
For Sleep II, using a Coordinated R01 mechanism, a second field-based examination will be conducted on the same sample of women (aged 51-62 years), incorporating the same procedures. A widely-cited heuristic model of the pathophysiology of sleep disturbances will be applied to these longitudinal data to evaluate the development of menopause-related sleep disturbances in this multi-ethnic sample of women. This model attributes acute sleep disturbances to the combined effects of predisposing and precipitating factors, and persistence of chronic sleep disturbances beyond the acute stressor to perpetuating factors.
The public health relevance of this research is to understand better the changes in the sleep of women from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and identify risk factors for sleep problems. The results can inform primary prevention of adverse health outcomes due to the menopause-related sleep disturbances.