Dr. Natalia Bromley
Understanding the effects of poor sleep on pain

Abstract: 
Pain is widely known to disrupt sleep. In addition, compelling evidence has emerged to suggest that poor sleep has an even greater effect on pain perception. This opens a possibility to improve pain symptoms by treating sleep problems. However, there is a lot less clarity on the specific aspects of sleep that can be modified to improve pain and the populations that would benefit from various sleep interventions. This talk will highlight some of our recent experimental pain/sleep studies in healthy participants and chronic pain populations  (osteoarthritis)  aimed at mechanistically understanding the link between sleep and pain to inform sleep treatments targeting pain. I will discuss our results with respect to sleep duration, including in specific sleep stages, highlighting the role of slow-wave sleep for pain. The talk will also touch on the neurobiological mechanisms that might underpin the link between sleep and pain. Finally, it will highlight significant sex differences in the relationship between sleep and pain, suggesting that females might be more vulnerable to the detrimental effect of poor sleep on pain. 

Bio: 
Natalia Egorova-Brumley is an Associate Professor at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and the Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Hub. She completed her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, and received postdoctoral training in pain neuroimaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School. After moving to Australia, she worked at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health before starting her own Pain and Cognition Neuroimaging Lab at the University of Melbourne funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC). She combines cognitive and clinical neuroimaging lines of research to understand how pain impacts the brain and how cognition alters pain processing. She is currently a Dame Kate Campbell Fellow and an ARC Future Fellow investigating the neurobiological mechanisms of the interaction between pain and sleep.

ALL ARE WELCOME.

Contact

If anyone wants to arrange a meeting with Dr. Natalia Brumley during her visit at CFIN, please get in touch with:
Professor Yury Shtyrov
Emil: Yury.shtyrov@cfin.au.dk
Phone:  +45 78469940