WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – A leading sleep expert at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center has been invited to speak to an experts consensus conference on chronic insomnia at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The entire three-day conference will be webcast on the internet.
Vaughn McCall, M.D., M.S., professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, will speak at 11 a.m. on Tuesday June 14 on physicians’ use of drugs “off-label” in the treatment of chronic insomnia.
Off-label means that that use is not among the indications for the drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The conference – the NIH State-of-the-Science Conference on Manifestations and Management of Chronic Insomnia in Adults – will run from June 13 to 15 at the Natcher Conference Center at NIH in Bethesda, Md. The sessions are free and open to the public.
The webcast will be live on the internet at www.videocast.nih.gov. Viewing the webcast requires software that can be downloaded free of charge from the NIH videocast website. Conference handouts will be available at www.consensus.nih.gov.
The conference, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Office of Medical Applications Research of NIH, will be answering the following questions:
* How is chronic insomnia defined, diagnosed and classified and what is known about its causes?
* What is the prevalence, natural history, incidence and risk factors?
* What are the consequences and public health burden of chronic insomnia?
* What treatments, alone or in combination, are used for the management of chronic insomnia?
* What is the evidence regarding the safety, efficacy and effectiveness of these treatments? McCall will present a drug-by-drug survey of the drugs currently being used off-label, including a number that have never been tested for insomnia using randomized clinical trials.
* What are important future directions for insomnia-related research?
After listening to presentations on the first two days, members on the consensus panel will draft and present a state-of-the-science statement answering the key conference questions.
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Media Contacts: Robert Conn, rconn@wfubmc.edu, Shannon Koontz, shkoontz@wfubmc.edu, or Karen Richardson, krchrdsn@wfubmc.edu, at 336-716-4587.
About Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center: Wake Forest Baptist is an academic health system comprised of North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University Health Sciences, which operates the university’s School of Medicine. The system comprises 1,298 acute care, psychiatric, rehabilitation and long-term care beds and is consistently ranked as one of “America’s Best Hospitals” by U.S. News & World Report.