Sleep Disorders Center at BIDMC
Clinical
The Sleep Disorders Clinic is accredited by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and is staffed by faculty from Neurology (Drs. Tom Scammell, Ina Djonlagic, Monica Makhija, Maggie Blattner and Paul Rosenberg) and ten specialists in Pulmonary Medicine. The BIDMC Sleep Clinic is the largest and busiest of its kind in New England, and it provides evaluation and care to patients with a variety of sleep disorders. The clinics based in Neurology predominantly focus on problems such as narcolepsy and other central nervous system hypersomnias; parasomnias such as REM sleep behavior disorder and sleep walking; movement disorders such as periodic limb movements during sleep; seizures during sleep; and sleep disorders secondary to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and traumatic brain injury.
Education
Residents may choose to take an elective in Sleep Medicine with exposure to the spectrum of sleep disorders and opportunities to work with adult and pediatric sleep medicine specialists.
The program also offers an ACGME-accredited Sleep Disorders fellowship in which fellows have opportunities to learn from adult and pediatric sleep medicine experts from across the Harvard hospitals.
The training program typically support 5 fellows each year, with an individualized curriculum in adult and pediatric sleep medicine. Fellows wishing to pursue research are eligible for 2 years of research support through a NIH-funded training grant. More information about the fellowship can be found here. https://sleep.med.harvard.edu/training/clinical-sleep/BIDMC
Research
The BIDMC Neurology Department contains one of the largest basic science sleep research groups in the world. Drs. Saper, Scammell, Arrigoni, Ramalingam, and many others, study how the brain normally regulates wakefulness and sleep, and how dysfunction in these circuits contributes to sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, coma, and obstructive sleep apnea. Research techniques include optogenetics, chemogenetics, conditional pathway tracing, and rodent sleep recordings.
Several faculty in the department pursue clinical sleep research. Dr. Mullington and Dr. Haack study the how sleep and circadian rhythms affect hypertension, autonomic tone, and immune function. Dr. Djonlagic examines how sleep promotes learning and how poor sleep may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease, and Dr Makhija studies the interactions of sleep and epilepsy.
