Five Questions with Diane Lim, MD, MTR
Diane Lim, MD, MTR is a staff physician at the Miami Veterans Affairs (VA) Healthcare System within the Sleep Clinic and an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep at the University of Miami. She holds a Master’s in Translational Research.
What led you to work in sleep medicine?
My scientific research led me to sleep medicine.
I entered the field of sleep medicine in a roundabout way. I completed a Pulmonary-Critical Care fellowship in 2001 and after two years as a Pulmonary-Critical Care clinical educator, I accepted a position at Drexel University. There, I became an Associate Program Director of Internal Medicine where my responsibility was to find research opportunities for fellows and residents. I put together a collaborative research forum with engineers, basic scientists, and physicians. In doing so, I discovered this world where asking tons of questions was a prerequisite! This compelled me to explore if I had what it took to be a researcher. In 2007 I started my training at the University of Pennsylvania under Dr. Allan Pack and completed a Sleep Fellowship. I found that the more I learned about sleep, the more my interest grew. To be honest, I fall more in love with my work with every project.
Why is global sleep health important to you?
Everyone deserves to have good sleep but ensuring that everyone across the globe has good sleep is a massive challenge. My goal as a sleep physician-scientist is to improve sleep and health for everyone, not only those who can afford it.
I came to realize that most countries do not recognize sleep as a pillar of health, nor do they recognize sleep disorders. This results in no government funding to promote sleep health, conduct sleep testing, or treat sleep disorders. This means polysomnography, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), and medications are not covered.
What are you doing to promote global sleep health?
Through the World Sleep Society (WSS), I was invited to meet and strategize on how to champion sleep for the world’s underserved populations. This productive team under Dr. Phyllis Zee’s leadership, resulted in the following:
- A successful webinar with seven different technical units within the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss how sleep disorders impact many areas of health
- The creation of the WSS Global Sleep Health Taskforce
- A viewpoint for The Lancet Public Health written with Dr. Chandra Jackson
To me, global sleep health is not only about individuals getting good sleep, but the sleep field agreeing on what constitutes sleep health. I believe we need one method of measuring and monitoring sleep health to inform global policies, guide public health interventions, and track progress. Without global policies, we cannot achieve global sleep health.
What is one important thing you want people to know about global sleep education?
The most important thing I want people to know is that good sleep will improve so many aspects of your life.
It only makes sense that if a country is dealing with war or natural disasters, the government’s top priority is the people’s safety, clean water, food, and shelter. However, in countries where basic needs are met, sleep should be a top priority. In working with United States veterans, many sleep issues start with childhood trauma that exacerbates experiences in the military. I want people to know that good sleep can improve and even autocorrect so many things in their lives. I have witnessed how good sleep leads to better decisions about healthy eating, increasing physical activity, and overall caring about one’s health. I have witnessed how good sleep leads to thinking rather than reacting, which improves relationships with family and work.
What about sleep, are you most excited about?
Me personally, waking up feeling refreshed!
But, in the field of sleep research, sleep medicine, and global sleep health, I am most excited about wearables. Wearables are devices that someone can wear on their person to track their bodily functions, such as heart rate, steps, and sleep.
I think wearables provide big data about night-to-night variability and longitudinal data when tracking sleep. When scientists, clinicians, and engineers work together to develop ways to measure sleep, we can use a data-driven approach to determine a global method of measuring sleep. In countries where polysomnograms are available, this should be used to diagnose sleep apnea, but we should also use this data to develop algorithms to objectively identify disorders, from developmental delay to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD.
Once we have these algorithms, it can be simplified into a wearable. Then these wearables could potentially be used to monitor sleep and even personalize treatment. If that were to happen, it would be conceivable for developing countries to skip the investment of sleep labs and use wearables to diagnose sleep disorders. No matter what, sleep research, more than any other area of research, is lucky to have so many wearables that can provide data-driven approaches to achieving global sleep health.