After two years of groundwork that included securing funding, hiring staff members, and construction of a lab, the Sleep and Performance Research Center here will launch its first study next week.


The center, operated by Washington State University Spokane and located in the Riverpoint Higher Education Park, plans to launch several studies in the next year, all aimed at improving safety, productivity, and health in the workplace.


The studies will involve evaluating differences in physical responses to sleep deprivation, researching what goes wrong in the brain during sleep loss and how sleep fixes those problems, and investigating how sleep loss affects law-enforcement personnel, says Dr. Gregory Belenky, the centers director whos said to be one of the nations leading sleep researchers. The center hopes to perform sleep studies on employees at workplaces here such as Fairchild Air Force Base, Sacred Heart and Deaconess medical centers, the Spokane Police Department, and Hollister-Stier Laboratories LLC, Belenky says.


One of the overall goals of the studies is to learn why and how sleep loss affects people at work, so that businesses and government agencies can deter sleep-loss related problems.


Theres nothing exotic about sleep, so we dont wonder much about it, Belenky says. But most people in this country dont get adequate sleep, and that impacts our family life, safety driving to and from work, and safety and productivity at work.


The center was established in 2004 with $4.5 million in federal funding secured by the Spokane Alliance for Medical Research, which is a collaboration of Hollister-Stier Laboratories, Inland Northwest Health Services, WSU, the University of Washington, Eastern Washington University, Whitworth College, the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Battelle Memorial Institute.


The center concentrates solely on research, rather than operating a clinical lab to diagnose sleep disorders, he says. Its located in WSU Spokanes South Campus Facility, in a 5,000-square-foot space that was remodeled to create offices and a sleep laboratory, which includes a sleep suite area with four bedrooms and a common living area.


The center has hired two sleep researchers in addition to BelenkyDr. Hans Van Dongen and Dr. Bryan Vilaas well as about 18 other part-time and full-time employees, he says.


The centers first study will involve depriving subjects of sleep for 36 hours then allowing them a 36-hour recovery time and continuing that cycle over a 12-day period, during which they must remain at the center, he says. During the experiment, subjects will perform moderately- to highly-complex tasks for varying lengths of time. The experiment will involve a total of about 16 subjects, with four subjects being studied at a time.


The study, which Van Dongen is heading up, will analyze several elements of fatigue, including time spent awake, the time of day when tasks are done, the intensity of workload and time spent on a task, and individual differences in resistance to the performance effects of sleep deprivation, Belenky says. Van Dongen began the study a couple of years ago when he worked at the University of Pennsylvania, then brought the study and its funding to Spokane.


The study is exploring why cognitive responses to sleep loss differ among people, and how to predict individual responses to sleep loss, he says. The work has implications for people who occasionally or routinely lose sleep, due largely to occupational demands or lifestyle. Although occupations that involve long hours and irregular schedules, such as police officers and medical students in residency training, seem to be the most likely candidates to have sleep loss-related problems, even modest sleep lossdropping to seven hours of sleep a night from eight hourshas been shown to hurt mental performance, reaction time, and judgment, Belenky says.


Meanwhile, the center also plans to work with employers here on sleep studies of their employees, and hopes to decide which employers it will work with in the next few months, he says. Possible subjects include workers who refuel aircraft at Fairchild, medical students in residency training, police officers, and laboratory technicians at Hollister-Stier.


Separately, Belenky says he has applied for a $1.5 million grant from a private foundation, which he declines to name, for a study he plans to start in January. If the center doesnt receive that grant, Belenky still plans to start the study early next year and will pursue other funding for it.


That study will involve using a lightweight, infrared brain-imaging device thats the size of a quarter. It will be applied to a subjects scalp to track brain activity continuously. The experiment will study both animals and humans, since they both have been shown to have impaired functions due to sleep loss, he says. The findings of that experiment will be important to the study of sleep because researchers currently are limited to analyzing snapshots of brain activity, rather than continuous data, he says.


There are certain fundamental questions about sleep that we dont have answers to, such as what goes wrong with the brain during sleep loss and how sleep fixes it, Belenky says. Hopefully, this will help us understand the brain, and even shed light on conscious experience and thought.


Meanwhile, in a separate experiment, Vila hopes to start a study within a year that will focus on the effects of sleep loss on law-enforcement personnel, Belenky says. Vila has applied for a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense for that study, and expects to find out by April whether he will receive that grant. Vila hopes to use the money to build a life simulator in a 5,000-square-foot space next to the centers current office and laboratory space. The lab would include a virtual-realty driving simulator, a treadmill exercise machine, a firearms-training simulator, and a paperwork-related task, all with the goal of re-creating an average workday for a police officer, he says.


Studies of the effects of sleep loss on government employees are important because those workers make decisions that affect public safety directly, and their performances can be hurt by fatigue, Belenky says. Yet, Vila has examined government documents related to the terrorist attacks of 2001 and Hurricane Katrina, and found almost no mention of long work hours and sleep loss and how those factors might have affected workers performance, and ultimately, the course of those events, he says.


In addition to long work hours, shift cycles also might cause sleep deprivation, because employees must adapt to sleep schedules that dont fit their physiological needs, he says. The bodys natural sleep rhythm induces fatigue between 10 p.m. and midnight and causes wakefulness at 7 a.m. Yet, employees who work day shifts typically must wake up before 7 a.m., while employees working graveyard have to sleep at odd hours, when the body isnt naturally tired, and consequently only get about five hours of sleep a night, he says.


Although fatigue might not always manifest itself in an employee falling asleep on the job, the cumulative effects of sleep loss over a period of time still affect performance, he says.


People could be wide awake, but not thinking clearly, Belenky says. Fatigue creates unsafe situations, and those situations can lead to accidents.


Researchers at the center hope their upcoming studies will show how sleep loss affects a persons performance, taking into account factors such as the time of day they work and sleep to predict how shift cycles affect them, he says.


Long-term, one solution to sleep loss as a result of work shifts would be to make sure everyone works the afternoon-evening shift, because studies have shown people who work that shift get the most sleep, he says. That would be difficult to achieve, though, given that many industries and the U.S. military, operate 24 hours a day, he says.


Rather than changing the shift cycle, some U.S. employers are trying to prevent sleep-loss problems by initiating what are called fatigue-risk management systems, Belenky says. For instance, Union Pacific Corp., the big Omaha, Neb.-based railway company, has a fatigue- management division that makes sure schedules include adequate time off for sleep at times that coincide with the bodys natural sleep rhythm. The division also measures performance, he says.


Contact Emily Brandler at (509) 344-1265 or via e-mail at emilyb@spokanejournal.com.