Sleep is a vital physiological function that changes qualitatively and quantitatively across the lifespan. Highly prevalent sleep disorders in older adults including insomnia, sleep-disordered breathing, and circadian rhythm disturbances have been associated with Alzheimer?s Disease and Related DementiasC7, accidents/falls, cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysregulation, polypharmacy, and increased risk of mortality in older adults. However, the process of diagnosis and intervention is often complicated due to the presence of multiple medical comorbidities/medications, disability, racial disparities and specific age-related risk factors for sleep disruption. Additional challenges to screening, diagnosing, and treating sleep disorders in older adults with Alzheimer?s Disease and Related DementiasC7 and those in long-term care facilities also exist. There is a pressing need to increase cross-talk between the geriatric research and sleep research communities in order to enhance opportunities for collaboration and research to address these public health concerns. This conference proposal, ?Aging and Sleep 2020?, is designed to address these gaps. Aging and Sleep is an international meeting dedicated to sleep medicine research in older adults. Since 2010, the Aging and Sleep international meeting has been held every two/three years in Europe with up to 400 delegates participating from 20 countries. Participants include physicians, research investigators, trainees, sleep technicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, as well as policy makers and media. This meeting offers a global platform that focuses on the latest scientific advances to facilitate interdisciplinary research. We propose in this application to host an Aging and Sleep conference for the first time in the United States, in order to capitalize on the growing pool of interested researchers and traineesC4 in these domains. Our organizing team has extensive experience based on prior iterations of the Aging and Sleep conference (Drs. Fannie and Hakki Onen), and will be partnering with the sleep research programs at the University of Pennsylvania (Drs. Allan Pack, Nalaka Gooneratne, Jini Naidoo).
Our specific aims are to: 1) Discuss recent research findings in the field of geriatric sleep disorders; 2) Create networking/collaboration opportunities between researchers in the geriatric research and sleep research communities; 3) Encourage trainee development through 10C4 travel awards for trainees and a specific session on poster presentations/data-blitzC2 from new investigators; 4) Create an inclusive conference environment that adequately represents minority/under-represented groups; and 5) Disseminate findings through a summary of the conference, which will be published in the leading sleep/geriatric journals, and videosC5. The conference is timely since it addresses the growing appreciation of the interplay between aging and sleep disorders, with a thematic focus being their impact on Alzheimer?s Disease and Related DementiasC7, topics relevant to the research interests of the National Institute on Aging and high priority public health concerns.
A two-day conference titled ?Aging and Sleep 2020? will be held at the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN), Philadelphia, PA, on June 12-13, 2020. The conference will bring together research communities in the fields of geriatrics and sleep with a focus on a) recent research related to the complex relationships between aging, age-related conditions (with a thematic emphasis on Alzheimer?s Disease and Related Dementias) and pathogenesis of sleep disorders; and b) evidence-based diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.
