Shachi Tyagi
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Bladder problems such as needing to urinate urgently or waking at night to urinate are common in older women. They are costly and raise the risk of falls, fractures, depression and nursing home placement.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
nocturia
urgency urinary incontinence
overactive bladder
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Test whether adding Brief Behavioral Treatment of Insomnia (BBTI) to the bladder drug mirabegron improves urgency urinary incontinence and nocturia more than mirabegron alone in a randomized trial of 100 women aged 60 or older.
- Measure changes in medial prefrontal cortex activity and brain structure before and after treatment to test whether better sleep improves brain control of the bladder, and assess whether benefits last 6 months.
- Assess the feasibility and acceptability of brief mindfulness, BBTI and their combination for nocturia in 60 women over 65 randomized to one of four groups, including a control.
- Compare effects on nocturia, nocturnal polyuria and the first uninterrupted sleep period at 4 weeks, 3 months and 6 months, using bladder-sleep diaries, questionnaires and Z-machine sleep recordings.
More about the research
Most treatments target the bladder alone and help only modestly. These projects test a different idea: poor sleep and the brain's control of the bladder are part of the problem, so treating sleep may improve bladder symptoms.
Why it matters
Urgency incontinence and nocturia reduce quality of life for many older women and add to falls, fractures and care costs. Adding sleep treatment to standard bladder drugs, or using simple home-based mindfulness, could offer gentler and more scalable ways to manage these conditions. Clarifying how sleep affects the brain's control of the bladder may also point to new brain-based therapies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Morhaf Al Achkar
Wayne State University, MI·Medicine & Clinical Research
Co-design a team-based sleep care pathway for oncology clinics with patients and staff through rapid build-test-refine cycles, finalizing universal screening steps, care-manager roles and warm handoffs, dashboards and checklists.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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