Sleep

Lead. A large web-based survey in Japan has found that underweight women in their 20s are more likely to report insomnia symptoms, but the same link does not appear in adolescent girls or in women over 30. The finding represents one of the first efforts to document an age-specific relationship between underweight and sleep problems […]

For decades, napping research has relied on a deceptively simple question: do you nap or not? In a new perspective piece published in Sleep Health, chronobiology researcher Marta Garaulet (University of Murcia, Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard) and co-author M. Rodriguez-Martin argue that this binary approach obscures the complex relationship between daytime sleep and health outcomes. […]

Many students have an intuitive habit: a quick glance at their notes just before turning off the light. New research suggests this simple practice may be more powerful than previously thought. A study published in Sleep Medicine X finds that briefly re-reading a text for just one minute before falling asleep actively boosts memory consolidation, […]

For three decades, researchers have tried to see what the brain does during sleep, not just which electrical rhythms pulse across the scalp, but which deep structures light up and fall silent across the night. The challenge has been technical: electroencephalography (EEG) captures millisecond-scale changes in cortical activity but cannot localize them subcortically, while functional […]

A five-day complete evening smartphone ban significantly improved sleep, cognitive function, and physical performance in university students, but only among those who were not dependent on their devices, according to a study published July 10 in Medicine (Baltimore). The findings suggest that nomophobia (the fear of being without one’s smartphone) is a powerful moderator of […]

Bright, stable, and minimally fragmented patterns of daily light exposure are linked to earlier sleep timing and deeper early-night sleep, according to a naturalistic field study published July 10 in NPJ Biological Timing and Sleep. The study, led by Sena Gulsum Akgun of the Izmir Institute of Technology and the University of Manchester, tracked 89 […]

Study benchmarks inflammation and metabolic markers for 5-year mortality prediction in sleep apnea Obstructive sleep apnea is linked to higher cardiovascular and all-cause mortality, but identifying which patients face the greatest risk remains a clinical challenge. In a study published July 10 in the Journal of Translational Medicine, researchers led by Jian Liu and corresponding […]

Lead. The glymphatic system, the brain’s dedicated waste clearance network, is emerging as a central player in neurodegenerative disease. A comprehensive new review in Current Opinion in Pharmacology consolidates evidence that glymphatic dysfunction is not merely a bystander but a mechanistic driver in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and Huntington’s disease (HD). The authors, […]

Lead. People with idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) are known to face a sharply elevated risk of developing Parkinson disease and related neurodegenerative conditions. But whether iRBD itself causes that neurodegeneration or simply shares common roots has been a stubborn open question. A new genetic epidemiology study now offers the strongest causal evidence to […]

The CB1 Receptor as a Convergence Hub Linking Stress, Sleep and Appetite A new conceptual review proposes that the cannabinoid type 1 receptor (CB1) acts as a central convergence point where stress, sleep, and appetite regulation intersect, offering a unifying neurobiological framework for understanding how these systems influence one another. The endocannabinoid system (ECS) has […]