Research Notes

Overly Tired Teens

Teens who are lethargic, cranky and forgetful may have a common ailment: chronic sleep deprivation. But some may actually have a medical condition such as depression, insomnia, narcolepsy or sleep apnea.

Richard Millman, M.D., a professor of medicine and director of the Sleep Disorders Center of Lifespan Hospitals, was the lead author of the report published in Pediatrics. The report marked a first, merging a review of more than two decades of basic research with clinical advice for physicians. It was a joint effort of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR), part of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute within the National Institutes of Health.

A joint committee formed by the AAP and the NCSDR wrote the paper. This 10-member committee included three other Medical School faculty: Mary Carskadon, director of the Bradley Hospital Sleep and Chronobiology Research Laboratory; Judith Owens, M.D., director of the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children's Hospital; and Suzanne Riggs, M.D., director of the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Hasbro Children's Hospital.

"For reasons that have to do with both biology and behavior, many young adults don't get the sleep they need. So our take-home message is that teens need more sleep," Millman said. "Physicians also need to be on the alert. While most teens are tired because they are sleep deprived, chronic drowsiness may, in some cases, be a symptom of an underlying sleep disorder."

Gene Mapping

Mapping the interactions between thousands of genes is critical to understanding human development and disease. Leon Cooper and John Sedivy led a research team with colleagues at Universita di Bologna and Tel Aviv University to develop a sensitive, reliable tool for analyzing these connections, based on an innovative experiment using a notorious cancer protein. The result: potential treatment targets.

Cooper, professor of physics and neuroscience and director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems, and Sedivy, chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry and director of Brown's Center for Genomics and Proteomics, published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Genes influence one another in many intricate ways," said Cooper. "What we need is a map, or network, of these links. What we've identified in this project is a more effective method for making this map."

The Brown research team also included Brenda O'Connell, Nicola Neretti, Gastone Castellani, and Nathan Intrator.

Bad Bounce

Annual injuries from backyard trampolines have nearly doubled in the past decade, according to new Medical School research presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

James Linakis, M.D., revealed results of a review of trampoline injuries to children from a sample of emergency departments across the United States. Linakis found that nearly 75,000 children on average were seen in emergency departments for trampoline injuries each year during 2001 and 2002, almost twice the number reported in the early- to mid-1990s.

Most of the injuries -- 91 percent -- occurred at home.

"Parents so far have not gotten the message that trampolines should not be used in the home environment. They should be used in very structured, well-monitored environments, with proper supervision. Frankly, that supervision probably doesn't and can't happen at home," said Linakis, an associate professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics and a pediatric emergency physician at Hasbro Children's Hospital.

Sex Abuse and Science

In a policy paper published in Science, Ross Cheit argued that despite child sexual abuse being both common and harmful -- causing health problems, substance abuse and criminality -- research on the topic is underfunded, obscured by controversy and fragmented by academic discipline.

Cheit, associate professor of political science, and six national colleagues say the cure is to recognize child sexual abuse as a public health problem -- one that requires multidisciplinary efforts to improve prevention, treatment, and education. The authors also called for the creation of a new institute on child abuse within the National Institutes of Health.

Compiled by Wendy Y. Lawton