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SLEEP 2026 | Community therapist-led sleep education program to improve sleep in children with autism
Beth Ann Malow, MD, Vanderbilt Health, Nashville, TN, discusses a community-based sleep education program designed to improve sleep in children with autism. Prof. Malow explains how the initiative trains community therapists to deliver a simple, evidence-based intervention, equipping them to coach parents in implementing effective sleep strategies at home. This interview took place at the 40th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) in Baltimore, MD.
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Transcript
I’m very proud of this program, which is going on in about four states right now, in New Hampshire, in Tennessee, in Colorado, and in Georgia. And what we do is we train behavioral and other therapists in how to help families who have children with autism, how to help those families teach their children to sleep better. So the therapists train the parents. And it’s really a beautiful partnership because the therapists who we train are very much trusted and respected by the parents...
I’m very proud of this program, which is going on in about four states right now, in New Hampshire, in Tennessee, in Colorado, and in Georgia. And what we do is we train behavioral and other therapists in how to help families who have children with autism, how to help those families teach their children to sleep better. So the therapists train the parents. And it’s really a beautiful partnership because the therapists who we train are very much trusted and respected by the parents. And there’s a lot of them. There are many more therapists than doctors out there. And they’re also very good at empathy and really working with these families. So they are coaching the parents through a very simple, streamlined, evidence-based program that we’ve developed and written about and published. In fact, we had American Academy of Sleep Medicine funding to do this program several years ago. And now we have additional funding to show that we can disseminate it and implement it in larger populations. So we’re very grateful to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine for that funding.
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Disclosures
Consultant: Neurim Pharmaceuticals.
