Erik St. Louis
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
In REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), people physically act out their dreams. The muscles normally go limp during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage when most vivid dreaming occurs.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
REM sleep behavior disorder
REM sleep without atonia
polysomnography
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Standardize research-grade polysomnography across NAPS2 sites and record more than 300 people with REM sleep behavior disorder twice, two years apart, alongside matched controls.
- Quantify REM sleep without atonia (muscle activity during dreaming sleep) by several methods, and measure how it changes within individuals over two years, to support its use as a synucleinopathy biomarker.
- Develop signal processing and machine learning methods for brain-wave (EEG) and other sleep signals with the consortium's data and statistics core, and share all recordings publicly.
- Test whether home-based polysomnography is a feasible and reliable alternative to laboratory sleep studies for people with REM sleep behavior disorder.
More about the research
In RBD they stay active. A sleep study, or polysomnography (PSG), records this as REM sleep without atonia (RSWA). RBD is often an early sign of a synucleinopathy. Synucleinopathies are brain diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, in which a protein called alpha-synuclein builds up. Evidence suggests RSWA could serve as a biomarker that tracks this disease. It increases over time, predicts who will go on to develop clear disease (phenoconversion), and matches clinical measures of synuclein pathology. Yet no standard RSWA values exist to use as a biomarker, because large multi-site data are lacking.
Why it matters
People with REM sleep behavior disorder face a high risk of Parkinson's disease and related synucleinopathies, but there is no reliable measure of how their disease is progressing. Establishing REM sleep without atonia as a validated biomarker could help select patients and measure outcomes in future trials of treatments meant to protect the brain. Public data sharing and home sleep testing could widen access to this research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jesse Cedarbaum
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Profile immune cells in the blood of all 100 RBD trial participants and in the CSF of 30 of them, using single-cell RNA sequencing and in vivo perturb-seq, to see how the anti-TNF drug adalimumab changes immune cell function.
Lauren Whitehurst
University of Kentucky, KY·Psychology
Test whether women show greater alcohol-induced sleep disruption than men, by giving intravenous alcohol or saline placebo before eight hours of lab sleep recorded with polysomnography in adults aged 21–45.
Elwali Ahmed
Marian University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Refine the wakefulness breathing-sound screening algorithm by reducing the influence of body measurements on classification and adding within-person variability, combining deterministic and non-deterministic machine learning models.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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