Sleep

Clinicians have long observed that women with endometriosis tend to sleep poorly, but the relationship has been dismissed as secondary to chronic pain. A new study published in Functional & Integrative Genomics turns that assumption on its head, marshaling evidence from epidemiology, genetics, and molecular biology to argue that sleep disorders and endometriosis share biological […]

The cycle is vicious and familiar to millions of teenagers and their parents: poor sleep leads to more time on the phone, and more phone time makes sleep worse. But a new study published this week in PLoS One reveals what actually drives that loop, and the answer has less to do with screen time […]

The old adage “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” has shaped sleep advice for centuries. But according to new research published in Sleep Health, both early birds and night owls face a substantially higher risk of heart attack compared to people with an intermediate chronotype. The conventional belief […]

A strange thing happens in the middle of a 100-mile trail race. Runners who have been awake for 30 hours, climbing vertiginous alpine passes in the dark, often refuse the one thing they objectively need most: sleep. They worry that stopping to nap will cost them minutes, maybe a podium spot, maybe a finish at […]

Why do cells need sleep? The question sounds almost philosophical, but a team led by Zhijian Ji at UCSF has given it a concrete molecular answer. Using a custom-built biosensor they named GENTIS, the researchers discovered that individual cells accumulate protons during periods of sustained activity, and that this intracellular acidification directly triggers sleep behavior. […]

The numbers are staggering. Alzheimer disease (AD) affected 57 million people globally in 2019, a figure projected to reach 153 million by 2050. The cumulative economic burden between 2020 and 2050 exceeds INT$14 trillion. Dementia is already the fifth leading cause of death worldwide, claiming 2.4 million lives in 2016, with 6.4 million disability-adjusted life […]

For years, sleep disturbances in patients with neurodegenerative diseases were treated as secondary symptoms, unfortunate but downstream consequences of a dying brain. A growing body of evidence has collapsed that assumption. A new synthesis published in Med Clin North America by Desai and colleagues argues that sleep disorders and neurodegeneration are fundamentally bidirectional: each condition […]

Obstructive sleep apnea affects roughly a quarter of adults worldwide, and the number is climbing. Its cognitive toll is well documented: deficits in attention, executive function, spatial memory, working memory, and situational memory. But the mechanism has never been fully explained. Prior research focused on inflammation, oxidative stress, and apoptosis in the hippocampus, but it […]

For decades, body mass index has been the default screening tool for obstructive sleep apnea. A high BMI raises suspicion; a normal BMI often redirects the clinical gaze elsewhere. Yet BMI is fundamentally a proxy. It cannot distinguish muscle from fat or say where on the body that fat lives. In East Asian populations, where […]

Your headlights cut a tunnel through the dark highway. The lane markers drift. You correct. They drift again. Your eyes feel heavy, and the rumble strip startles you back to alertness. Most drivers know that feeling. What they do not know, according to new research from the University of Zurich, is that a single sleepless […]