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Approved research

Analysis of sleep phenotypes, genotypes and associated conditions

Principal Investigator: Dr Guy Leschziner
Approved Research ID: 19705
Approval date: March 1st 2017

Lay summary

Insomnia is increasingly understood to be associated with a variety of other sleep conditions, as well as cardiovascular disease, dementia and psychiatric illness. We aim to better understand the nature and direction of these associations, and to identify genetic contributions to insomnia and other sleep traits. We also intend to see if there are subgroups of individuals with different types of insomnia, based upon phenotype and genotype. An understanding of the relationship between sleep disorders and disease of major public health interest will hopefully focus attention on a potentially modifiable set of risk factors for ischaemic heart disease, stroke, hypertension, dementia and psychiatric disease. Identifying genetic polymorphisms underlying insomnia may permit the development of new therapeutic targets based upon newly discovered biochemical or genetic pathways. We aim to analyse genetic and neuroimaging data according to the presence or absence of insomnia and associated sleep traits, to identify common genetic variants that increase susceptibility to insomnia. There is evidence that insomnia can be subdivided into different subgroups based upon psychological trait data and psychiatric co-morbidity, and we aim to undertake cluster analysis on the whole cohort to see if particular genetic variants are correlated with particular psychological/psychiatric trait data. We also aim to investigate the correlations with neuroimaging data where available. We would like to include the whole cohort.