SLEEP 2024 Annual Meeting in Review: Sleep Inequities, Mental Health Among Highlights of Conference

The SLEEP 2024 Annual Meeting took place between June 1 and June 5, 2024, in Houston, Texas. The meeting was as big as ever, with 3 full days of symposiums and discussions open to the general public and more than 1000 abstracts presented during poster sessions. With all of the excitement of the meeting, some of the highlights of the conference could be easily missed. The American Journal of Managed Care® is here to recap the highlights of the SLEEP conference.

Sleep inequities were a major talking point at the conference, with sleep deserts in hospitals, colleges, prisons, and refugee camps a focus of a session held on June 5. In the session, “Sleep Deserts and Beyond,” Lauren Robinson, MD, MPH; Ronald Gavidia Romero, MD, MS; and Hrayr Attarian, MD, spoke about these health inequities. Attarian in particular focused on refugees, who get less sleep than non-refugees.

“In the past decade or so, the number of people worldwide who are displaced by war or forcefully displaced by violence has dramatically increased,” he had said. According to him, 108.4 million people worldwide were considered displaced. Refugees in particular were affected by insomnia due to severe economic standards, financial insecurity, and lodging as part of their external challenges but also were affected by post-traumatic stress and nightmares related to war. Attarian also presented data that found that sleep was the biggest indicator for quality of life in these refugees.

This focus on refugees was accompanied by Robinson’s presentation on the prison setting, where the short amount of time with the lights off, poor mattress quality, loud noises, and a prisoner's mental health can all affect the amount of sleep that a prisoner can get. In a similar vein, Romero highlighted that college students who don’t get enough sleep could be hindered in their academic pursuits.

Hypersomnia and narcolepsy was also a topic of discussion at the SLEEP Annual Meeting. The morning of June 4 featured a packed room for the “Advances in Narcolepsy and Idiopathic Hypersomnia Diagnosis and Management” symposium. The symposium started with Kiran Maski, MD, MPH, describing the new updates in the protocol for testing adolescents for idiopathic hypersomnia and narcolepsy using a polysomnography (PSG) or multiple sleep latency test (MSLT).

Woman struggles with sleep | Image credit: StockPhotoPro - stock.adobe.com

Also featured during this session was a talk by Julie Flygare, who had received 2024 Public Service Award from the Sleep Research Society. Flygare talked about preliminary data from a survey evaluating how many patients with narcolepsy knew others with the condition. According to her, the early numbers found that 96% of patients with type 1 narcolepsy did not know anyone else with narcolepsy at the time of their diagnosis. Although this number improved from diagnosis to the time of the survey, more than a third of patients with type 1 narcolepsy did not know another patient with the condition at the time of the survey. The survey also found that patients aged 31 to 50 years with narcolepsy were more likely to feel supported with their condition.

The remainder of the symposium focused on alternatives to MSLT, including the Psychomotor Vigilance Task, actigraphy, and 3 different protocols developed in Europe for PSG. Improvements in the treatment of narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia were also highlighted, including orexin receptor-2 agonists that could target the cause of excessive daytime sleepiness and narcolepsy.

Mental health was also covered during the conference, with the relationship between sleep and bipolar disorder (BD). According to Jennifer Goldschmied, PhD, who led the symposium “Sleep, Circadian Rhythms, and Bipolar Disorder: From the Lab to the Clinic,” sleep can have an effect on suicidal thoughts in patients with BD.

“What we found was that self-reported sleep difficulties were a significant predictor of suicide risk even in the entire sample,” Goldschmied had said. “But a unique pattern of sleep symptoms is predictive of suicide risk in each subtype of bipolar disorder.”

Patients with late chronotypes were also more likely to have mood episodes and depressive symptoms. Hypomania and mania episodes were also reduced in patients who had later chronotypes.

Challenges in collecting sleep data in adolescents was also touched on during the conference. This included new ways to collect actigraphy with FitBit, the limitations to FitBit as an actigraphy device, how at-home devices for adolescents to collect electroencephalogram (EEG) data for circadian timing, and the differences between EEGs done at the lab and at home, primarily in making sure that the device stays on the adolescent for the duration of the test.

The SLEEP 2024 Annual Meeting included many sessions, abstracts, posters, and presentations throughout the week meeting. These highlights scratch the surface of the incredible research and advances in the space throughout the past year. The SLEEP meeting for next year, set to be held in Seattle, Washington, is sure to be just as informative and interesting when the conference is held in 2025.