Active Diabetes, Hormones & Metabolism Psychology & Behaviour

Sleep And Circadian Health Disturbances In Psychosis And Depression: The Cascading Impacts Of Impairments In Cognitive Control

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations Imperial College London · King's College London · University of Kent · University of Liverpool Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £1.8M
Period Sept 2024 — Aug 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A disrupted body clock may be driving the cognitive decline that makes psychosis and depression harder to treat. Sleep and circadian rhythms are known to be disturbed in mental illness, but it is unclear whether these disruptions cause worsening symptoms or are merely a consequence of them. This project will test a specific mechanism: that poor sleep and irregular circadian cycles impair cognitive control—the brain’s ability to manage attention, suppress irrelevant thoughts, and regulate emotion—and that this impairment then amplifies psychotic and depressive symptoms. The researchers will compare three groups with increasing levels of sleep disruption: healthy people on regular schedules, shift workers, and patients with depression or psychosis. By using shift work as a natural experiment, they can isolate the effects of circadian disruption from the illness itself. If the model holds, it would identify cognitive control as a modifiable link between sleep and mental health. That could shift treatment toward early, targeted interventions—such as timed light exposure or cognitive training—to normalise sleep behaviour before full-blown illness develops. The work is primarily fundamental, clarifying a causal pathway, but it could eventually reshape how clinicians sequence treatments for early psychosis and depression.

View original technical description
This project addresses the unmet challenge of the role of sleep and circadian health in precipitating and perpetuating adverse mental health outcomes in healthy and clinical populations. We will a) use a multidimensional approach to index sleep and circadian health; b) explore the dynamic interplay between sleep, circadian rhythm, and cognitive and emotional processing in healthy and clinical populations; c) examine a model of sequential comorbidity, from sleep disturbances to mental health disorders, through assessing the perturbation from variable work schedules using shift work as a naturalistic manipulation of the impacts on sleep, cognition, psychotic-like and emotional symptoms; and d) explore the role of cognitive control mediating the impacts of sleep/circadian disturbances on mental health. We will study the following 3 groups with increasing potential for sleep/circadian disturbance and adverse mental health consequences: healthy participants with regular work schedules, shift workers with variable work schedules and patients with depression & psychosis who have disturbed sleep/circadian disturbance. Understanding the dynamic relationship between circadian biomarkers, sleep, cognition and mental health outcomes is critical in order to be able to develop interventions to meet the outstanding challenge of normalising sleep/circadian rhythm related behaviour in the early stages of psychotic and depressive illness.

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Researchers

Adam Hampshire (EPMC Awardee)Dan Joyce (EPMC Awardee)Gurprit Lall (EPMC Awardee)Sukhwinder Shergill (EPMC Awardee)Teresa C. D'Oliveira (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

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