Supported by the Dauten Family Foundation and Sandra Lee Chen and Sidney Chen, the Harvard Brain Initiative (HBI) Bipolar Disorder Seed Grant Program funds research relevant to the basic understanding and treatment of bipolar disorder at Harvard University and its affiliated hospitals. It funds innovative, visionary projects with new ideas and approaches that address fundamental questions about the disorder and may not attract funding from conventional sources.
The program was launched in 2015 with the vision of the Dauten family. It has issued over 90 grants and led to five symposia to date. This year, with the Dauten and Chen families’ generous gifts coming together, the program has grown to provide two-year seed grants of $174,000 each, supporting the launch of 11 diverse projects spanning the realms of basic, translational and clinical research.
Louisa Sylvia, PhD to Study Novel Intervention to Improve Mood and Wellness
This year, Louisa Sylvia, PhD, Associate Director of the Dauten Family Center for Bipolar Treatment Innovation at MGH and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, has received a seed grant and will explore how a novel intervention can improve mood and overall well-being in individuals with bipolar disorder. In her work and research, Sylvia has advocated for a holistic approach to treatment, highlighting the importance of diet and exercise on improving outcomes. She is the author of The Wellness Workbook for Bipolar Disorder: Your Guide to Getting Healthy and Improving Your Mood.
In this interview with the Harvard Gazette, Sylvia discusses her motivations for this project, acknowledging the limitations of our current treatment strategies and her focus on well-being and quality of life in patients with bipolar disorder. The seed grant will allow her to conduct a trial to evaluate the effects of time-restricted eating (TRE), which limits meals to a set window of time each day and has been linked to weight loss, improved mood, and improved sleep. She will collaborate with Leilah Grant, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who specializes in sleep and circadian physiology. The study will investigate how the regulation of eating habits affects weight, mood, cognition, quality of life, and sleep patterns.
Impact of Time-Restricted Eating on Weight Loss, Mood and Circadian Rhythms in Patients with Bipolar Disorder
Individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) face a higher risk for obesity, which is associated with poorer health outcomes. Time-restricted eating (TRE) is a novel dietary intervention that limits food intake to a 6 to 10-hr daytime ‘eating window’ (e.g., eating only between 8am to 6pm). TRE has been shown to improve weight loss with promising data that it may also improve mood, cognition, and sleep. It is expected that TRE may help regulate one’s daily rhythms, a common factor that has been shown to be disrupted in both obesity and BD. Despite its potential, no studies have examined TRE in individuals with bipolar depression and comorbid obesity. To address this gap, we seek to examine the effect of an 8-week TRE intervention on weight loss and secondary health outcomes in individuals with BD and whether these associations are due to improvement in circadian rhythms. We will enroll 48 adults with BD, currently experiencing at least mild depressive symptoms and obesity. These participants will be randomly assigned to either TRE or a wait list control to examine the impact of TRE on body weight, secondary health outcomes (e.g., mood, quality of life, cognition) as well as circadian rhythms.
Louisa Sylvia, PhD is the Associate Director of the Dauten Family Center for Bipolar Treatment Innovation at Mass General, the MGH Director of the Office of Women's Careers, and an Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. Her primary research interests are developing psychosocial interventions for bipolar disorder, particularly improving the management of exercise, nutrition, and sleep in this clinical population.
