School of Nursing: Connections

Pioneer sleep lab still going strong after 20 years

Betty Giblin applies electrodes to “patient” Joan Shaver in the School of Nursing’s sleep lab. (Photo courtesy of Carol Landis and Martha Lenz.)

"In 1979, I applied for a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service to study sleep disturbances in patients who had chronic obstructive disease. I also obtained money from Safeco to buy an ear oximeter and managed to borrow an electro encephalogram machine. So, on a shoestring budget, we managed to open the first nursing school sleep lab. It was also the only one in Seattle at the time, and several doctors referred patients to us for study."
- Betty Giblin ’43

When emeritus faculty member Giblin pioneered the laboratory study of sleep in schools of nursing, she encouraged interest in a subject that would soon have national implications. Her own research interests went on to include studies of men who suffered from sleep apnea as well as studies of sleep patterns in patients with chronic obstructive lung disease and Alzheimer’s disease. These early studies reflected a growing interest in the role sleep plays in many different illnesses and disease, to the extent that sleep studies have since become focus areas of the National Institute for Nursing Research.

In the 1980’s, researchers in the School’s sleep laboratory shifted focus to the study of sleep patterns in midlife women. An initial study by Giblin and nurse physiologist Joan Shaver looked at the relationship between sleep cycles and the hormonal fluctuations of menopause. Later research considered the broader implications of other Biobehavioral and ecological factors, such as the relationship between sleep loss and immune activity by investigators Carol Landis and Martha Lentz. Landis, Shaver and Lentz have also done pioneering research on multiple factors affecting sleep in women with fibromyalgia. Today there is a growing cadre of investigators engaged in sleep research. Studies on sleep and heart failure are being continued today by Dr. Terri Simpson and Dr. Sandra Motzer while Dr. Margaret Heitkemper and Dr. Monica Jarrett are examining sleep in women with irritable bowel syndrome. Dr. Margaret Dimond is examining sleep patterns in adults with dementia, and Dr. Patricia Prinz has a long history of research on sleep in healthy aging. The Sleep Research Laboratory is now one of the core biobehavioral laboratories affiliated with the Center for Women’s Health Research in the School, and is also affiliated with the de Tornyay Center on Healthy Aging.

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