Dr Rebecca Spencer explains how SLEEP 2023 will connect basic and clinical sciences

Rebecca Spencer, PhD, is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Chair of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies Program Committee.

In this preview interview for SLEEP 2023she highlights how bringing patients and clinicians together can inspire new ideas in sleep medicine and why attendees will see the field of sleep health disparities woven throughout the conference.

Transcription

Why is the SLEEP meeting such an important event in the field of sleep medicine, for clinicians, researchers and patients?

This conference is really important for our field, and the reason is that it brings together basic science researchers with sleep medicine researchers in clinical sciences and with practitioners, and as you pointed out, with patients and patient advocates. And that integration is really where I think the new ideas come from. It’s about dissemination, it’s about seeing your discoveries from a different perspective. All of that is really what drives us on, but also maybe refines our questions or steers our questions in a really meaningful way.

How will the content of this year’s meeting build on the knowledge gained in previous years and contribute to discussions on the ground?

This meeting is really going to build on all the work that’s sort of built up over the last few years, and it just keeps bringing some really exciting areas to the fore, but also new things on the table. It’s really hard to highlight just one thing.

I will say that one of the themes that I find really interesting is the work on sleep health disparities, so some of our main conferences have discussions around those themes. And I think that’s really an important direction, because then we can really think about the important areas that sleep medicine needs to focus on. Do we diversify the populations in the studies that we have already done in the past? And really think about how that advances our sleep medicine and sleep health goals.

There are just a few other really interesting discussions that I think will bridge the fields of basic science and clinical science very well. We have work focused on aging; as you can imagine, this is also a very important area of ​​sleep health. So really, we’re going to run the gamut from pediatrics to geriatrics and everything in between.

It’s really exciting not only to bring everyone together from these different fields – from medicine, from basic research – but also from the pandemic days when we were on Zoom. But there’s still this tendency to do a lot of things virtually, and what we’re missing are those casual conversations that we have after discussions or after meetings which I think are where a lot of the real science. What I mean by that is when we go to these conferences and we can sit down over lunch and say to ourselves, “Let’s talk about this meeting that we all just had. What did you think of it? And you get your other ideas of what could have happened.

It is for me that the conversations take place. And now we can also integrate patients and patient advocates into these lunches that we have later, and now we have clinicians and we all have basic scientists around the table. For me, that’s really where we get those ideas that will become next year’s conference presentations and next year’s conference presentations. So I think that’s really what SLEEP is going to bring us and why I’m so excited to be back next week.