Pervez Sultan
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
The weeks after childbirth are a vulnerable time for mental health. Yet some major problems in this period are rarely measured well or treated early.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
postpartum PTSD
post-traumatic stress disorder
traumatic childbirth
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Test the feasibility and acceptability of Written Exposure Therapy, a five-session expressive writing treatment, and Capnometry Guided Respiratory Intervention, a home breathing program, in a randomized pilot trial of 60 postpartum patients with PTSD symptoms.
- Compare PTSD severity, depression, anxiety, maternal-infant bonding and breastfeeding at 6 weeks and 3 months among patients receiving either therapy or routine nursing or social work follow-up.
- Assess whether hair levels of cortisol, cortisone and progesterone, measured by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, track PTSD severity and treatment response after traumatic childbirth.
- Adapt the PROMIS Sleep Disturbance and Sleep-Related Impairment questionnaires for postpartum use, adding items on infant sleep, night feeding and awakenings drawn from stakeholder interviews, focus groups and cognitive debriefing.
- Calibrate and validate the adapted sleep questionnaires in 640 diverse women, using structured clinical sleep-disorder interviews and wrist actigraphy as benchmarks, and test links between postpartum sleep and postnatal depression with causal inference.
More about the research
Up to one-third of US women describe childbirth as traumatic, which raises their risk of postpartum post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Poor sleep after birth is also common, and it is tied to slower recovery and to postnatal depression, a leading cause of maternal suicide. The lab's two projects address both problems. One tests brief early treatments for postpartum PTSD. The other builds a better questionnaire to measure postpartum sleep and screen for sleep disorders.
Why it matters
New mothers, especially those who had severe complications or whose babies needed intensive care, could benefit from brief, remote PTSD treatments that fit into busy perinatal care. A validated postpartum sleep questionnaire could help clinicians screen for sleep disorders, spot disparities and find mothers at risk of postnatal depression. Hair hormone measures may eventually inform more personalized mental health care.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Grant Pignatiello
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Psychology
Test whether REFRAME, a tablet-based cognitive reappraisal program, reduces depressive symptoms in ICU surrogate decision-makers compared with informational support, in a 387-person randomized controlled trial.
Michelle Roley-Roberts
West Virginia University, WV·Psychology
Test in a randomized controlled trial with 100 at-risk pregnant women in rural West Virginia whether the online Preventing Postpartum Onset Distress program reduces prenatal anxiety and other postpartum anxiety risk factors more than an anxiety education control.
Patricia Haynes
University of Arizona, AZ·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the CBTi-based firefighter sleep health coaching program reduces sleep disturbance in 400 career firefighters across 20 departments, using a stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial with questionnaire and actigraphy outcomes.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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