Dr Amanda Sathyapala

Summary

SUMMARY

Amanda Sathyapala is a Senior Lecturer in the Airways Disease Section of the National Heart and Lung Institute of Imperial College London and a Consultant Respiratory Physician, and Clinical Lead of the Home Ventilation Service, at Harefield Hospital. Her clinical expertise is in sleep-disordered breathing, which includes obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) and hypoventilation secondary to obesity and severe chronic lung disease, chest wall deformity or neuromuscular conditions, chronic respiratory failure and home nocturnal non-invasive ventilation. She is also accredited to deliver Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia. Her current research is aimed at improving patient adherence to CPAP. She is Research Committee Lead for the British Sleep Society and sits on their Executive Board, is a member of the Regional Advisory Committee (RAC) for the RfPB London region NIHR funding scheme and reviews for the top ranked respiratory and muscle journals.

TRAINING, QUALIFICATIONS AND AWARDS

Dr Sathyapala studied Medicine at Cambridge University (1993–96) and Oxford University (1996–99), obtaining First Class Honours both in Medicine and also in Experimental Psychology during an intercalated BSc year. Dr Sathyapala completed her junior doctor training in Oxford and London and completed her specialist Respiratory and General Internal Medicine training in the North-West Thames region, in hospitals including the Hammersmith, Harefield and the Royal Brompton Hospitals. She was awarded a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training Fellowship to complete her PhD (awarded 2011) in Professor Mike Polkey’s lab at the Royal Brompton Hospital, which also included a year abroad in the Netherlands, at Maastricht University in Professor Annemie Schols’ lab. Dr Sathyapala was awarded a HEFCE Clinical Senior Lectureship; since 2012, she has been a Senior Lecturer and a Principal Investigator at the NHLI and an Consultant Physician at the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. She was elected as Fellow to the Royal College of Physicians in April 2015.

CURRENT RESEARCH

Dr Sathyapala’s research relates to adherence to CPAP in patients with OSA which is low based on existing data from trial participants. Her group have demonstrated that CPAP adherence rates are very low in clinical cohorts across the UK, between 27-50% in 2019 and 29-51% in 2020 and described a novel model of CPAP adherence behaviour. Her team are current developing a healthcare intervention for NHS sleep services to provide patients when starting CPAP to increase patients' adherence to CPAP.

PREVIOUS RESEARCH

Dr Sathyapala’s work has previously been on skeletal muscle dysfunction in COPD and in other chronic diseases, in particular to identify molecular mechanisms which underlie premature muscle fatigue hence exercise intolerance and which are amenable to drug treatment. This is a small field but one of growing importance as skeletal muscle dysfunction is an important cause of frailty, which is a growing problem in ageing populations. To raise awareness of importance of this problem and to foster collaborative working between basic and clinical scientists with common interests, Dr Sathyapala hosted the first international symposium on ‘Skeletal muscle oxidative metabolism as a target for treating human disease’ at the NHLI in 2016.

Selected Publications

Journal Articles

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