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Staff Profile

Dr Kirstie Anderson

Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer

  • Email: kirstie.anderson1@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: 0191 282 3111
  • Address: Department of Neurology
    Royal Victoria Infirmary
    Queen Victoria Road
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 4LP
Background

I am a consultant neurologist specialising in sleep and circadian rhythm disorders. Sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain and when we sleep badly for any reason, it has an immediate and long term impact on mood and memory.


SLEEP AND MENTAL HEALTH

We study the patterns of sleep disturbance in those with mental health problems; in particular bipolar disorder and acute in-patients in psychiatry wards. We have shown within the ASCRIBE study that many patients have severe sleep and circadian rhythm disturbance even when mood is stable and this can be part of poor memory. Within the acute in-patient psychiatry wards, sleep disturbance worsens outcomes but the ward environment can be part of the problem. We work with academic psychiatrists within the SleepWell project that has studied the impact of protected sleep and sleep training on the wards. SleepWell is working to protect sleep in the some of the most vulnerable patients in the NHS in some of the most challenging places.


SLEEP AND AGEING

Poor sleep is recognised as a risk factor for cognitive impairment in both those with who are normally ageing and also those with neurodegenerative disease such as Parkinson's disease or Alzheimers disease. We have shown that those with objectively short sleep were shown to have increased mortality and morbidity, ongoing longitudinal assessments of sleep patterns in the PPMI cohort are providing valuable insights into patterns of sleep that predict cognitive decline. Working with Professor Nicola Pavese, we are studying functional imaging to try and predict which patients with REM sleep behaviour disorder are most at risk of future parkinson's disease.y


MEASURING SLEEP OUTSIDE OF THE SLEEP LAB - BIG DATA

Using the many thousands of participants within the Biobank cohort we showed that poor sleep predicted worse cardiometabolic health and those with the best sleep had highest levels of physical activity. Both short and long sleep predict worse cognition and waist lines.

At present the gold standard for measuring sleep is with an in-patients sleep study (video polysomnography) which is time consuming and invasive for patients who have to come into hospital. Advances in signal processing have led to increasingly sophisticated accelerometer devices detecting patterns of movement during the day and night that characterise both good and bad sleep. We have validated novel accelerometers against the gold standard of polysomnography and are now working with computer scientists to use AI to improve on manual sleep scoring.





Teaching

I teach on every aspect of sleep medicine at undergraduate and postgraduate level


Lead for Neurology SSC medical students


Undergraduate and postgraduate teaching across MRES, PhD, academic clinical fellow and medical students


I developed and lead for the Newcastle Sleep Training days, a national two day conference that are run every summer and attract a wide range of health professionals and students.

Publications