Stanford Psychiatry’s Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski Awarded Grant Using Sleep Intervention to Target the Emotion Regulation Brain Network and Treat Depression and Anxiety
October 2024
Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, PhD
We are pleased to announce that Stanford Psychiatry’s Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, has received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health for a novel use of a sleep intervention to target the emotion regulation brain network and treat depression and anxiety.
Several lines of evidence suggest that insomnia contributes to emotionally distressing depressive mood symptoms through disruption of brain networks that regulate emotional functions. Of particular concern, insomnia is associated with an increased risk for suicide, even when accounting for the presence of other depressive symptoms. However, it is not yet known to what degree the emotion regulation brain network is modified by the restoration of sleep, or whether the degree to which a sleep intervention engages these neural targets mediates reductions in depressive symptoms and suicidality.
This study investigates the impact of a proven sleep intervention on engagement of the emotion regulation brain network as a putative mechanistic target. The study team will work to confirm target engagement by testing the hypothesis that compared with an active control condition, participants who receive cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia will show significant change in the emotion regulation network targets at the end of treatment. They will then examine the relationships of target engagement to treatment outcomes by study group and test whether emotion regulation network measures at baseline predict depressive symptoms and suicidality reduction. Characterizing these associations has the potential to offer a deeper understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying depression in the presence of insomnia.
“Unhealthy sleep patterns contribute to emotional distress by disrupting the brain networks that regulate emotion. We utilize an innovative multimodal neuroimaging approach to determine if a proven sleep intervention alleviates depressive mood symptoms and reduces suicidality by normalizing these networks,” says Dr. Goldstein-Piekarski. “The findings will advance an evidence-based mechanistic approach to treating, and ultimately preventing, the emotionally distressing and potentially life-threatening impact of insomnia, with profound potential impacts on population health.”
As the director of the CoPsyN Sleep Lab, Dr. Goldstein-Piekarski is developing a translational, interdisciplinary research program that combines human neuroimaging, high-density EEG sleep recording, and computational modeling to understand the neural mechanisms through which sleep disruption contributes to affective disorders, particularly depression, across the lifespan. The ultimate goals of this research are to (1) develop mechanistically informed interventions that directly target aspects of sleep and brain function to prevent and treat affective disorders and (2) identify novel biomarkers that can identify which individuals are most likely to experience improved mood following targeted sleep interventions. Recent publications related to this work include “Viability of an Early Sleep Intervention to Mitigate Poor Sleep and Improve Well-being in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Protocol for a Feasibility Randomized Controlled Trial” and “Integrating sleep, neuroimaging, and computational approaches for precision psychiatry.”
More Information
For more details about this new grant, visit NIH’s RePORTER