Sleep

Lead. For centuries, the climbing vine Passiflora incarnata — better known as passionflower — has been brewed into teas, pressed into tinctures, and packed into capsules aimed at quieting a restless mind. Traditional herbal medicine systems across Europe and the Americas have long turned to it for insomnia, anxiety, and nervous tension. Modern research has […]

Lead Every night in sleep labs around the world, a small plastic clip lights up red on a patient’s finger. That clip is a pulse oximeter, and the number it displays — blood oxygen saturation, or SpO2 — is one of the most important numbers in sleep medicine. It determines whether a patient has sleep […]

Effect of Benson Relaxation Exercise on Anxiety Level and Sleep Quality in Adolescents Receiving Inpatient Treatment in a Psychiatric Clinic A randomized controlled trial finds that a simple, nurse-led relaxation technique significantly reduces anxiety and improves sleep in hospitalized adolescents. Lead Adolescents admitted to psychiatric units face a double burden: the acute mental health condition […]

A small stroke in a deep brain region that relays sleep rhythms can cripple both memory and pain sensitivity, but a nightly dose of rhythmic sound may reverse the damage, a new study in Stroke reports. Using an optically guided stroke model in awake mice, researchers at the University of Bern showed that a targeted […]

Lead The brain does not stop tracking where the eyes are looking just because the eyelids are shut. A team of neuroscientists at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has shown that gaze-related activity persists throughout the cerebral cortex and cerebellum even when participants close their eyes and, remarkably, continues during sleep. The finding challenges a long-held assumption […]

Lead. People who overuse headache painkillers are significantly more likely to suffer from chronic insomnia and restless legs syndrome, a new prospective case-control study finds. And the good news: when the underlying headache problem is treated, those sleep disorders largely resolve on their own. The study, published in the European Journal of Neurology, is the […]

A drink before bed does more than put you to sleep, it can invert the very relationship between sleep and memory, a new study in Current Biology reports. In fruit flies, alcohol makes sleep actively harmful for memory consolidation, and keeping the animals awake paradoxically rescues their ability to remember. Researchers from the University of […]

Evening workouts produce better endurance performance than morning sessions, but the size of that advantage depends on your chronotype and sleep timing. A study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology finds that individual differences in circadian phenotype explain up to a quarter of the variation in how much better people perform later in […]

Lead Why do women experience chronic insomnia more often and more severely than men? A new study published in Sleep suggests part of the answer lies in subtle differences in the electrical rhythms that characterize deep sleep. Researchers led by Nyissa A. Walsh at Concordia University in Montreal found that chronic insomnia disorder and biological […]

Getting seven hours of sleep a night is widely recommended, but how you measure those seven hours matters. A large new study using UK Biobank data shows that device-measured sleep period time — the time a person actually spends in bed intending to sleep — is more strongly linked to lower risks of death, cardiovascular […]