Overview

In September of 2017, the National Institute of Mental Health’s  Division of Intramural Research Programs (IRP) convened a workshop to develop and promote Electrophysiologic Sleep Phenotyping (ESP) as a mainstay of the clinical assessment of children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders (see: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/events/2017/sleep-and-neurodevelopment-workshop-electrophysiologic-sleep-phenotyping-esp.shtml). The conference was attended by intramural and extramural clinical scholars from multiple clinical disciplines, both adult and pediatric, as well as psychiatric geneticists, bioengineers and bench scientists. A Sleep and Neurodevelopment Consortium was established, comprised of several Working Groups, focused on addressing the major obstacles impeding the pace of discovery and tasked with the creation of a standardized protocol to acquire and analyze pediatric sleep EEG signals in association to neurodevelopmental milestones.

Consensus from the 2017 Workshop was that mouse, rat and other animal models can inform greatly and need to be included more centrally in discussions about the intersection of Sleep & Neurodevelopment. And thus, in September of 2018, a similar group re-convened for Electrophysiologic Sleep Phenotyping (ESP): Translation. The purpose was to gather a small group of clinical and translational researchers to examine existing animal models for sleep and to inform on sleep’s role in neurodevelopment in order to continue to foster cross discipline collaborations. Immediate goals included focusing on building the infrastructure to obtain extant sleep EEG pediatric datasets, collate and archive these data in a central database and embark upon refining hypotheses.

In March of 2019, the S&N Consortium, with PIs Ashura Buckley at NIMH and Mirjana Savatic at Neurologic Research Institute (NRI), was awarded an infrastructure grant from the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Foundation to realize this goal. The 2021 Workshop will report on these infrastructure efforts. It will also focus on building the research questions and opportunities to fill the data gap regarding the role of sleep in the very early years in the establishment of healthy neural networks and in reflecting aberrant neurodevelopment.