Web of Sleep

Mona El-Sheikh and colleagues examine sleep and a myriad of related factors

By Jonathan Cullum

Across Lee County, Alabama, a dozen children of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds are asleep in their beds, the quality and length of their sleep being monitored by special watches strapped to their wrists. They are among a rotation of over 200 participants in a sleep study that began 10 years ago, one of many led by Dr. Mona El-Sheikh during her 27 years as a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, within Auburn University’s College of Human Sciences.

From an unassuming building near the center of campus, El-Sheikh helms the Child Sleep, Health and Development Laboratory—open seven days a week—where her staff and a team of more than a dozen undergraduate research assistants test the participants’ cognitive abilities and various physiological functions in relation to how they’ve been sleeping.

“I never really examine just sleep by itself,” El-Sheikh pointed out. Across a number of studies, she has delved into inter-partner conflict and sleep, economic adversity and sleep, parental depression and sleep, and other correlates. Her focus on sleep, El-Sheikh observed, fits within a long-running framework of examining children’s well-being in the context of family risk and particularly biological regulation factors. “And what I tend to find generally is that family risk predicts negative outcomes in children,” she said.

When she began, around 17 years ago, to hone in on sleep and its impact on child development, El-Sheikh said, “It was a very new area, and we did not have many studies with just regular, typically developing children from the community.” Most researchers at that point, she added, were only looking at children with clinically significant sleep problems.  

As the impact of poor or insufficient sleep became more widely recognized as a potential public health problem, she noted, her research expanded “to integrate sleep with all the other variables that I look at—so many outcome variables,” and eventually broadened wider still, to include parameters of socio-cultural context such as poverty, race and ethnicity.

In trying to determine the potential benefits of sleep, El-Sheikh and her team have had some significant findings. “One of the most exciting things we have found is that longer and better-quality sleep—so it’s not really just the length, it’s the quality—are protective against a lot of the family risk and socioeconomic risk variables,” she explained. “So that is one big discovery that I’m really excited about.”

As the years have gone by, some of her studies have grown to six or seven waves of participants, with a typical wave involving 250 or more children recruited from local schools. The research process starts in El-Sheikh’s lab with questionnaires, standardized cognitive assessments, and an evaluation of participants’ physiological regulation factors such as heart rate and palm sweating. Then the children wear wristwatch-like ActiGraph monitors at home for a week, to collect data on how well—or poorly—they sleep. In some of her studies, El-Sheikh monitors the parents’ sleep as well, looking for connections among the sleep patterns of the entire family.

In another recent study, El-Sheikh and Auburn Psychology Professor Dr. Jennifer Robinson evaluated the impact of sleep deprivation on brain function in a group of 14-year-olds. Research assistants kept the participants awake on a Friday night, limiting their sleep to four hours. The next morning Robinson had their brains scanned in the world-class 7-Tesla scanner at Auburn’s MRI Research Center and put them through a battery of cognitive and emotional regulation tests. The following weekend, they went through the same process with a full night’s sleep, for comparison.

Robinson described the results of that study as “eye-opening,” noting that certain areas of the brain were found to function differently, simply based on the amount of sleep the subject received. El-Sheikh pointed out that this area of inquiry—using a 7-Tesla scanner with children and adolescents—is new to the field but has produced “a very strong pilot study.”

To continue her successful track record of research funding from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, El-Sheikh submits frequent grant proposals and likes to work outside her comfort zone, but impressing proposal reviewers can be a balancing act. “You almost have to be ahead of the field but not too way out,” she explained.  “Thinking outside the box and trying not to be afraid of going ahead, taking the field ahead—that’s risky at times.” 

El-Sheikh added, “I typically do not shy away from exploring areas that are related to my work across various disciplines,” giving credit to collaborators like Auburn colleague Dr. Joe Buckhalt, with whom she organized a 2012 conference on sleep and child development, Dr. Stephen Erath, Robinson, and the late Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University. 

But for El-Sheikh, the risks keep paying off. In another new study, she will focus on the sleep and cognitive functioning of kindergarteners and their readiness for school, adding “I haven’t worked with that age in a long time.” It’s a component of her interest in health disparities research, she said, explaining that she hopes to understand better how certain health problems related to sleep develop across a person’s lifespan.

“What if sleep’s chronically bad? What if sleep improves over time?” she asked. “So, let’s say, the child early on had bad sleep for whatever reason. Now their sleep is improving. Does that mean their adjustment is improving? Or are they basically stuck because early on they did not develop the brain connections that they needed?”

As she reflects upon her 27-year career at Auburn—long enough that colleagues like Robinson view her as “a terrific mentor”—it is clear that questions like these are not keeping her up at night but rather driving her forward. Given that sleep impacts—and is impacted by—so many other aspects of a person’s health and development, it is easy to get the impression that El-Sheikh and her colleagues will not be running out of questions, or answers, any time soon.

Original publication date: April 2017