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About 80% of people diagnosed with or undergoing treatment for cancer will experience insomnia. And Oxana Palesh, Ph.D., M.P.H., knows insomnia is more than an inconvenience.

“Sleep disruption is associated with every aspect of functioning. And it never makes someone’s quality of life better,” said Palesh, who will be joining the VCU School of Medicine this spring as professor of psychiatry, where she will study the interaction between sleep and cancer.

Palesh will also be co-leading the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at Massey Cancer Center.

Sleep itself is a mystery. Despite spending roughly a third of our lives sleeping, scientists still don’t quite know why we do it in the first place, or why getting a good night’s sleep so vital for health. In extreme cases, sleep deprivation can even cause death.

“We’re still in early stages of understanding sleep,” said Palesh, who is currently an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. “If you take it to the cancer world, there’s so much more to learn.”

For instance, there is some indication that tumors themselves might disrupt our circadian rhythms – the internal clocks that tell us to sleep at night and wake up in the morning – and lead to insomnia.

Fortunately, unlike many other psychiatric disorders, insomnia is quite responsive to interventions, and addressing it early on could prevent sleeplessness from becoming ingrained as a chronic condition.

To fit sleep therapy into the already grueling treatment schedule of a cancer patient, Palesh distilled a popular program for insomnia down into just two in-office visits and four phone calls with a trained cognitive behavioral therapist.

Soon, she’ll be recruiting 400 patients in community cancer clinics across the country for a phase III randomized, controlled clinical trial to test how well this program works in practice.

Palesh also has a second line of research, in collaboration with UT Austin, involving an observational study of breast cancer patients that aims to understand cancer-related cognitive impairment – sometimes referred to as “chemo brain.”

Since cancer-related cognitive impairment often coincides with insomnia, the findings of this study could lead to better-tailored sleep interventions these patients.

“Dr. Palesh is one of the shining examples of excellence in 21st century cancer care. Her research is at an incredibly high level, and she’s dedicated to making sure that it reaches the people we serve,” said director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at Massey, Robert A. Winn, M.D., senior associate dean for cancer innovation and a professor of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at the VCU School of Medicine. “We’re fortunate to have her here among our ranks.”

“I am so delighted to welcome Dr. Palesh to VCU,” said Robert L. Findling, M.D., M.B.A., chair of psychiatry at the VCU School of Medicine and C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Distinguished Chair in Clinical & Translational Research. “She is not only a gifted scientist, but also a person who brings a sense of mission and compassion to her work.”

Written by: Erin Hare