For the past several years, researchers at the University of Iowa’s Blumberg Lab have been working on a study to observe sleeping patterns in infants.
The Blumberg Lab’s research focuses “on the development, neural mechanisms, and functions of sleep to understand why animals sleep so much more when they are young and what can go wrong when they don’t,” according to its website.
The study, funded by a five-year $3.1 million National Institutes of Health, or NIH, grant, focuses on twitches during rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep in extremely and mildly preterm infants. It aims to correlate sleeping patterns with motor behavior and long-term outcomes, including cerebral palsy and developmental delays.
Premature infants included in the study will be categorized into two groups: extremely premature who are born before 32 weeks and mildly premature who are born between 32-36 weeks.
Additionally, the research will also include full-term infants for age-matched comparisons.
As researchers began the study back in 2022, they initially focused on infant rats and video recordings of newborns to make their observations.
But now, researchers will soon be able to collect data from over 450 babies through multiple sessions in their first six months of life, using electroencephalogram testing and additional video recordings to track brain activity and twitching.
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Blumberg Lab Baby Lab Manager Hailey Long. emphasized the importance of this study, along with consistent sleep for infant development.
“We want to see how, given these patterns and things that we can now observe with the baby being born so early, that is different from the full-term infants,” Long said.
As the Baby Lab manager, which involves overseeing the hands-on execution of the study, including following up with families and conducting sleep study sessions, Long said she will organize the data from the study.
“We’re the only ones who are looking at it in this much detail, and we’re going to be the ones to make those types of connections that people haven’t been previously able to, because they’re not associating movements during sleep with diagnostic methods,” Long said.
The research study is currently in its recruitment phase, which aims to enroll babies as early as one month old and conduct three sessions within the first six months.
“I think [the study] could open up a world of possibilities and just better outcomes for infants in the future,” Long said.
Mark Blumberg, University of Iowa distinguished chair and department chair of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said the study will track clinical outcomes for premature infants, looking at their motor behavior two months after discharge from the NICU.
“One reason why we’re studying premature infants is that they are at risk for a variety of motor and cognitive problems, including cerebral palsy and developmental delay,” Blumberg said. “We will track to see how our findings with sleep relate to clinical outcomes.”
Blumberg emphasized the importance of protecting sleep in premature infants, as disruptions to their natural sleep patterns are potentially detrimental.
“Our study should highlight further the importance of protecting sleep in these kids, because their natural state while in the womb is to sleep a lot,” Blumberg said. “Arriving early and living initially in these sometimes noisy, bright, and disruptive environments can interfere with sleep and thereby introduce problems for their development.”
In addition, Blumberg said the team works closely with pediatricians, neonatologists, and research nurses in the UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital.
Greta Sokoloff, a research scientist in the Blumberg Lab, said the study is the first of its kind to examine twitches during sleep in detail, while also aiming to uncover new insights into brain activity during the early stages of life.
“It does seem to be the case that the brain is more active during sleep than during wake, which is important for brain development, and that the bulk of that activity is around these periods of time when the babies are twitching,” Sokoloff said.
While the current study is still in its data analysis phase, Sokoloff said they are already seeing intriguing patterns of behavior.
Future research directions will largely depend on the findings of this current project, but the team remains open to potential grant renewals and continued exploration of infant sleep development.
“It’s still too early to know what differences we may see with twitching, but there’s going to be some interesting stuff, including differences relative to how recently you’ve been born, regardless of how premature you are,” Sokoloff said.