Jessica Japra is a UW School of Nursing BSN student and one of the de Tornyay Center for Healthy Aging’s 2024–2025 Undergraduate Research Scholars. Her research project is “The Roles of Chronotype and Cognitive Function on Feasibility of Cognitive Training for Older Intensive Care Unit Survivors,” and her faculty mentor is Maya Elias.
Why did you choose nursing?
I chose nursing at a very young age. I started my pre-nursing prerequisites at 16 because I did Running Start. I wanted to do something in healthcare, but I was unsure what kind of profession I wanted to do. When I researched a little bit about nursing, it was everything I wanted. I get to advocate for patients and see interventions work right in front of me.
I have a cousin who was an LVN [licensed vocational nurse] or LPN [licensed practical nurse] in California, and she told me about working in assisted living. It sounded like something I wanted to do.
The logistics were also a factor. I knew I needed to do Running Start. My parents are older, and as the oldest daughter of our immigrant family, I needed to start earning because my parents are about to retire.
What about healthy aging in particular interests you?
I got into nursing school, and I joined the honors program. At the same time, there was also the opportunity for a long-term care nursing externship.
This last May, I became a nursing technician in neuroscience acute care specialty at Harborview. The population of patients we see includes older adults who have strokes, patients having spinal surgery, epilepsy patients or patients with traumatic brain injuries. I would see how patients’ recovery process isn’t as advanced as it could have been. They face a lot of delirium continued from the ICU. It affects how they do their OT [occupational therapy] and their PT [physical therapy].
That’s how I was inspired to pick my BSN honors project in delirium and its relationship to other cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s or related dementias. I started talking to my mentor, and she helped me connect these points.
As I’m doing the externship and the honors program together, I see how older adults can end up in rehab facilities or transitional care facilities because of their continuum of hospital stay to the facility. Someone gets a stroke or a TBI, and then they end up in the ICU. Then they’re there for so long they start getting delirium from the constant care they’re getting, which needs to happen, but it affects their sleep.
Then they are medically stable enough to discharge, but their cognitive abilities are still not there. There need to be interventions to make the process easier for them.
Could you briefly talk about your project with the de Tornyay Center scholarship?
We are studying how people’s natural sleep cycles, or circadian rhythms, are disturbed. We take their own reports of their thinking skills and assess how well they can accept and work with computerized cognitive training (CCT).
The criteria are ICU survivors who are 60 years old or older, were independent before hospitalization and are within 48 hours of moving from intensive care to acute care. We do this brain training program for around 30 minutes for seven days. We give them a tablet, and they play mind games designed to help them cognitively. It can be games with blocks, racing or pianos.
They also fill out a questionnaire to find out their sleep pattern, or what we call their chronotype. Basically, we’re trying to find out if they’re a morning person, evening person or afternoon person to see when they are most likely to perform well in these interventions with the CCT. After the training, when they have completed all the 30-minute sessions or until they leave, we use surveys and questions to see how their sleep patterns and thinking patterns connect to how well they have accepted the program.
In the future, we want to develop personalized treatments that consider sleep patterns and thinking skills to reduce delirium and cognitive decline.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
I would take this section to say how grateful I am to receive the scholarship. Getting the scholarship really gives me an opportunity to further my education and is motivating me to keep going with my interest in healthy aging.