Claudia Lugo-Candelas: Perinatal Sleep Health and Offspring Neurodevelopment

Key Takeaways:

• Many pregnant people struggle with disrupted sleep and assume that it is a normal part of pregnancy, but there are interventions that can help pregnant people sleep better.
• Prior research demonstrates a relationship between prenatal sleep and birth outcomes, and new data suggests prenatal sleep disruptions may increase childhood risk for neurodevelopmental conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and sleep problems.
• Discrimination-related disparities may affect prenatal sleep in minority communities, potentially contributing to disparities in birth outcomes and child neurodevelopmental outcomes.

Speaker:

Claudia Lugo-Candelas, PhD

Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Columbia University Medical Center
New York State Psychiatric Institute

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Lugo-Candelas is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in the perinatal programming of risk and resilience for neurodevelopmental disorders. She obtained a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Columbia University in the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division. She is now the Bender-Fishbein Scholar in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University, where her lab focuses on better understand the early development of inhibitory control difficulties, particularly within developmental disorders such as ADHD. The Lugo Lab is particularly committed to understanding the exposures and experiences that are most relevant to communities that are minoritized, underserved, and underrepresented and particularly interested in examining sleep health in the perinatal period as a mechanism of intergenerational transmission of adversity.

Date: Wednesday, March 8th, 1 to 2pm ET