Dream cure for insomnia

In the middle of Northumbria University’s city centre campus sits a cosy apartment fitted with a kitchen, living room, two furnished en-suite bedrooms and a well-stocked bookshelf. This is the base for Northumbria’s world-leading Centre for Sleep Research.

Nestled among the classrooms and lecture theatres of a bustling modern university, the Centre provides an oasis of calm for Northumbria’s resident sleep experts who are focussed on understanding and solving the world’s sleep-related problems.

The Director of the Centre is Dr Jason Ellis, who featured in last year’s BBC TV series Goodnight Britain. As a child, Dr Ellis was plagued by nightmares which inspired his life-long mission to solve the mysteries of sleep. He launched his academic career in this field while on placement in the Sleep Disorder Unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in London as part of his Psychology degree.

Dr Ellis said: “The Centre is a modern apartment sitting right in the middle of our research facilities without a wire in sight. All the other centres in the country are really just beds in laboratories - as are most across the rest of the world. While these lab-based facilities have contributed significantly towards our understanding of sleep, we believe that a more comfortable and homely setting helps people relax more and therefore, allows our researchers to observe a more natural night’s sleep. This makes our Centre the first

Centre ecologically valid sleep research centre in the UK.”

The bedrooms in the Centre are fitted with closed-circuit television cameras that relay pictures to a control room where Dr Ellis and his team of research students monitor participants’ sleep.

Researchers from the Centre were the first to understand the scale of the problem preventing a good night’s sleep. They identified that more than a third of people in the UK are likely to suffer from acute insomnia each year – this being characterised by difficulty sleeping over a period of up to three months. The team now plans to explore the factors that can cause the move to chronic insomnia with sufferers enduring restless nights for three months or longer. Such cases can lead to other conditions, including depression.

Dr Ellis added: “GPs write ten million prescriptions for sleep medication every year; costing upwards of £15 million for the health service. Through the research we carry out, we aim to alleviate that by building greater knowledge about sleep and associated problems.

“We used to think that it was stress that led to sleep loss and illness but now we are beginning to see how the relationship might be the other way round and it is insomnia that creates the stress and illness in the first place. We are beginning to understand how intimately sleep and health are related and facilities such as those in our Centre are directly fuelling that understanding. This is an enormously exciting field to be involved in at the moment.”

To find out more on the work of the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research, please visit: www.northumbria.ac.uk/ sleepresearch