Sleep

For millions of people who take benzodiazepine receptor agonist (BZRA) sleep medications, the prospect of stopping them is daunting. These drugs, which include common benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, can lead to dependency, cognitive impairment, and falls, especially with long-term use. Newer classes of sleep medications, such as melatonin receptor agonists and orexin receptor antagonists, are safer […]

Insomnia afflicts more than half of all patients with advanced cancer, yet few large trials have examined non-drug treatments for this population. A new multicenter exploratory randomized controlled trial from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center provides the strongest evidence to date that both acupuncture and massage therapy produce clinically meaningful improvements in insomnia for people […]

Most teenagers have felt it: the groggy Monday morning after a weekend of late nights and lazy wake-ups. The gap between weekend and weekday sleep schedules has a scientific name: social jetlag and new research from Spain shows it may come with a real academic cost. A study published in the European Journal of Pediatrics […]

Lead Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are increasingly used by athletes, coaches, and support staff as a quick source of health and performance advice. But how reliable is that advice when it comes to the complex, evidence-based domain of sleep science and jet lag management in elite sport? A new study published in Sports Medicine […]

Lead. The rigid separation of sleep into discrete REM and NREM stages has been a cornerstone of sleep scoring since Rechtschaffen and Kales. But a new paper in Sleep Medicine challenges that tidy picture. Qi Li, Zhijun Zhong, Qian Ouyang, Xueliang Zou, Fang Yi, Chunmei Gan, and Dongyuan Yao at Jiangxi Provincial People’s Hospital and […]

Waking repeatedly to urinate at night is more than an inconvenience. A new analysis of over 17,000 Americans suggests that daytime sleepiness — rather than shortened sleep itself — may be the key pathway connecting nocturia to depressive symptoms. Researchers from Sichuan University and Chongqing Medical University used data from the 2015-2023 National Health and […]

By Nathan For years, researchers have known that severe conflict between parents can ripple through a household in ways that harm children. But the mechanism has been harder to pin down. A new study from Shanxi University offers the strongest evidence yet that in Chinese families, the damage travels through a specific psychological pathway: parental […]

By Nathan Tobacco and cannabis are among the most commonly used psychoactive substances worldwide, and their co-use has risen sharply over the past decade as cannabis legalization expands across North America. Sleep is a critical health domain that both substances are known to affect individually, yet their combined impact on sleep has received surprisingly little […]

Lead. Sensory experience does not end when a sound stops. The brain holds onto incoming information for hundreds of milliseconds after the stimulus disappears, a phenomenon known as persistent neural activity. Until now, that persistence has been studied almost exclusively in awake, task-engaged subjects, where it supports working memory, decision making and action planning. Whether […]

Sleep disruption is a common and underappreciated complaint among people living with heart failure. A new editorial commentary published July 18 in the European Journal of Heart Failure draws attention to an overlooked mechanism: the breakdown of circadian temperature regulation. What Was Published The piece, “Too Hot To Sleep? Circadian Temperature Control in Heart Failure,” […]