Active Mental Health Diabetes, Hormones & Metabolism

Understanding and breaking the chain of disrupted sleep and mental disorders

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations Default Community Account · University of Lausanne · The University of Sydney · University of Zurich Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £3.1M
Period Mar 2024 — Feb 2029

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

By 2030, mental disorders are set to become the world’s leading cause of ill health, with anxiety, insomnia, and depression accounting for two-thirds of all cases. This project tackles a specific, proven link: insomnia is the single strongest predictor of risk, severity, and relapse for both anxiety and depression. The team will trace the biological chain that connects disrupted sleep to mental illness, from molecular mechanisms in the brain up to large-scale healthcare delivery. They will then use that understanding to identify people at risk and immediately direct them into two types of intervention: a scalable digital sleep-and-circadian eHealth programme, and trials of new pharmacological treatments. If successful, this work could shift mental health care from reactive treatment to targeted prevention, reducing the burden on health systems and improving quality of life for millions. The research is not purely fundamental—it is designed from the start to produce tools and treatments that can be deployed at population scale.

View original technical description
Mental disorders will be the number one health burden of our society worldwide in 2030. The top three among these are respectively anxiety disorders, insomnia and depression, together good for two third of all mental disorders. Genome-wide association studies [1, 2], prospective studies, meta-analyses [3, 4] and experimental studies [5, 6] all confirm that insomnia is key to the underlying biological mechanisms of the other two disorders. Insomnia is the primary transdiagnostic factor determining their risk, severity, chronicity and relapse. Since prevention is required to combat the worldwide burden of mental disorders [7], our best strategy to do so is to understand and break the chain of insomnia and mental disorders. Combining our most recent discoveries covering the full range of molecular neuroscience to large-scale health care implementation, our team will unravel the biological mechanisms of this chain and utilise and optimise markers to identify people at risk for immediate stratification into both scalable combined sleep and circadian eHealth intervention as well as studies on innovative pharmacological intervention.

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Researchers

Anita Luthi (EPMC Awardee)Eus JW Van Someren (EPMC Awardee)Hans-Peter Landolt (EPMC Awardee)Rick Wassing (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Original classification

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