SLEEP meeting a collaboration of basic science, clinical care

INDIANAPOLIS — Basic science, through the Sleep Research Society, and clinical care, through the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, have come together at the SLEEP 2023 meeting, June 3-7, here in Indianapolis.

SLEEP meeting program chair, Rebecca Spencer, PhD, professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Healio that few other fields see collaboration like this between basic and clinical science, making this conference unique.

“We bring together all those different viewpoints on the issues we talk about, and it makes our conversations provocative and productive,” she said. “When we can all mingle together is when we do our best work.”

Phyllis C. Zee, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, is delivering the plenary talk on bridging circadian and sleep science, Spencer said.

“This is a direction in which our fields have been moving in recent years,” she said. “For many years there was the SLEEP conference, and then there was the rhythms conference, and we’ve all acted as if we’re studying different things. Certainly, sleep and circadian rhythms are unique constructs, but they intersect so much in ways that we are now starting to bridge, and that’s exactly what Dr. Zee will talk about.”

Another topic of note includes environmental and community-based factors that lead to health and sleep health disparities, Spencer said.

“We also are really interested in reaching out to a more diverse membership and being a field that diversifies itself in many ways,” she said. “We are trying to be more open and encouraging of patients and patient advocates participating as part of our meetings, and we’re going to continue to discuss the success of that this year and what we could be doing to continue to develop that.”

The SLEEP meeting is returning to the format and attendance it had pre-pandemic, Spencer added.

“We went from being completely online to partially online and fully in-person,” she said. “Thats where most of the idea generation comes from — hanging out afterward and having a conversation about those things we just heard. It’s going to be great to be back at a place where we’re able to do that.”