Sleep

Even dim light at night — as low as 2 lux, comparable to a streetlamp filtering through curtains — disrupts sleep, increases fat gain, and elevates blood glucose in a dose-dependent manner, according to a study in zebra finches published in Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences. With light pollution increasing worldwide, the question of how much […]

Nearly two out of three combat sport athletes have poor sleep quality, with rapid weight loss of more than 4% body weight nearly tripling the odds, according to a cross-sectional study of 498 athletes published in Frontiers in Psychology. Combat sport athletes face unique sleep challenges from high training loads, pre-competition weight cutting, and the […]

People who suffer from both insomnia symptoms and excessive daytime sleepiness face a 32% higher risk of death and a 40% higher risk of cardiovascular events compared with those who have neither complaint, according to a large prospective study of nearly half a million UK Biobank participants published in Sleep Health. The risk increase went […]

An XGBoost machine learning model using just six readily available clinical and demographic variables, family history of diabetes, education level, marital status, chronic disease burden, chronic pain, and depression, can predict sleep disorder risk in diabetic patients with 85% accuracy, researchers report in Scientific Reports. The study, drawing on data from the China Health and […]

A large-scale survey of Chinese graduate students has traced how perceived stress degrades sleep quality through a sequential pathway: stress first fuels anxiety, which then drives bedtime procrastination, culminating in poor sleep. The chain mediation model, published in Frontiers in Psychology, offers a behavioral target for intervention that goes beyond simply telling stressed students to […]

A comprehensive review of the scientific literature from 2015 to 2025 has catalogued the pharmacological mechanisms through which traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treats sleep disorders, identifying four major regulatory pathways involving central nervous system neurotransmitters, sleep-related cytokines, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis hormones, and the gut microbiome. Published in Phytomedicine by researchers from Jilin Agricultural University, Yanbian […]

A 2-week randomized controlled trial has shown that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) enhances the brain’s fluid clearance dynamics in patients with insomnia disorder and comorbid anxiety, providing a mechanistic explanation for tDCS’s therapeutic effects beyond symptom relief. Published in BMC Psychiatry by researchers at Jilin University’s First Hospital in Changchun, China, the study measured […]

The dual orexin receptor antagonist suvorexant, already approved for insomnia, is emerging as a candidate for something broader: modifying the course of Alzheimer’s disease by simultaneously improving sleep and targeting the neurodegenerative cascade itself. A review published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease synthesizes the evidence linking the orexin system to Alzheimer’s pathophysiology and argues […]

A group of sleep and circadian researchers from the University of Sydney, Harvard Medical School, the National Institute of Mental Health, and six other institutions has formally proposed that circadian rhythms and their behavioral outputs be included as biomarkers in the forthcoming DSM-6. Published as a letter in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the proposal […]

Circadian rhythms are the body’s intrinsic 24-hour cycles, governing sleep, metabolism, immunity, and hormone secretion. But the machinery that keeps these cycles ticking is far more complex than the handful of clock genes taught in textbooks, and a new review in Cancer Cell International maps a layer of regulation that has only come into focus […]