June 2005

Leading sleep expert at Wake Forest to speak at NIH Consensus Conference

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:

Media Contacts: Robert Conn, [email protected], Shannon Koontz, [email protected], or Karen Richardson, [email protected], 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.