Sleep

Low-dose aspirin taken at bedtime has been proposed as a strategy to lower nighttime blood pressure, but the mechanisms behind this effect remain poorly understood. A new pilot study published in Sleep Advances suggests that sleep itself may be an important piece of the puzzle. Researchers from UConn School of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical […]

Polysomnography, the gold standard for sleep assessment, can be a difficult experience for any child. For children with autism spectrum disorder, an in-laboratory sleep study often means unfamiliar surroundings, sensory overload, disrupted routines, and the presence of strangers applying electrodes and monitoring equipment throughout the night. These challenges raise a practical question: can these children […]

Quantitative thresholds for REM sleep without atonia (RWA) are widely used to support the diagnosis of REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), a parasomnia that often precedes Parkinson disease and related synucleinopathies. But the optimal cutoff values and their relationship to the underlying neurodegenerative process have remained unclear, particularly across different populations. A new multicenter study […]

Lead Scoring sleep stages from EEG recordings is one of the most labor-intensive tasks in sleep medicine. A single overnight polysomnogram can generate thousands of 30-second epochs, each requiring a trained sleep technologist to classify. Automated sleep staging has made steady progress, but many deep learning solutions come with a heavy computational cost and function […]

A new study published in Neurology reveals a complex interplay between the wake-promoting neuropeptide orexin, non-REM sleep oscillations, and cognitive decline in Alzheimer disease. The findings suggest that the brain’s own sleep architecture may buffer some of the harm caused by an overactive orexin system. Researchers led by Anna Paez at the University of Oxford, […]

More than 20% of the global workforce engages in night shiftwork, a schedule that forces the body to be awake and eat when the internal circadian clock signals rest. The metabolic toll is well documented: higher rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease have all been linked to shiftwork. But the biochemical chain […]

Caffeine and Modafinil Counteract Sleep Loss Through Distinct Brain Pathways, ERP Study Shows Sleep deprivation impairs working memory, but the two most common countermeasures, caffeine and modafinil, achieve their effects through fundamentally different neural mechanisms, according to a new event-related potential (ERP) study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Researchers used a randomized, double-blind, crossover […]

That familiar slump that hits every spring, the urge to nap through the afternoon and drag through mornings despite longer days, may have less to do with biology than belief. A new large-scale study published in the Journal of Sleep Research finds no consistent evidence that fatigue, sleepiness, or insomnia symptoms change measurably across the […]

Insomnia and Circadian Rhythm Disruption Run Through OCD From Childhood to Adulthood Sleep has long been regarded as collateral damage in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a secondary symptom to be managed once the core obsessions and compulsions are addressed. A new systematic review in the Journal of Sleep Research challenges that assumption, marshaling evidence that insomnia […]

A new study reveals that activating a specific dopamine receptor in the brain can blunt the inflammatory response triggered by REM sleep loss in mice. The finding points to a molecular circuit connecting sleep deprivation, brain immune cells, and the dopamine signaling system that could eventually inform strategies for protecting the brain against the harmful […]