Sleep

Millions of athletes now sleep with a smartwatch on their wrist, trusting its nightly readout of deep sleep, REM, and recovery scores to guide their training decisions. The devices are cheap, comfortable, and ubiquitous. But do their numbers actually mean anything? A team of German researchers from the University of the Bundeswehr Munich and the […]

You would expect that eating less leads to losing weight. It is one of the most basic rules of energy balance. But a new study in mice suggests that when poor sleep and a fatty diet converge during development, that rule no longer applies. Researchers at Hebei Medical University in China found that young male […]

Sleep transforms the brain. Neurons that fire in synchrony during wakefulness break into new patterns as an animal drifts into non-REM sleep, then reorganize again during REM. But capturing exactly how those transitions unfold across large populations of cells has been a persistent technical challenge. Most studies record from a single cortical region or lack […]

For more than a century, the name itself has misled. Human African trypanosomiasis, better known as sleeping sickness, has been understood as a disease defined by excessive sleep. But the reality, researchers now argue, is far more complex, and the name obscures a deeper truth about how the parasite attacks the brain’s most fundamental rhythms. […]

Sleep is one of the first casualties of an ICU stay. Between alarms, ventilators, nursing checks, and the underlying illness itself, critically ill patients rarely get the restorative rest their bodies need. Clinicians have long turned to sleep medications to help, but a large new study from Japan reveals that what they reach for has […]

Lead A drug first isolated from the East African poison arrow tree more than a century ago, and long used in tiny doses to treat heart failure, appears to reverse the anxiety-like effects of severe sleep loss in mice by quieting inflammation and oxidative damage in the brain’s memory center. Researchers at Dali University in […]

About one-third of people with epilepsy continue to have seizures despite taking medication. For many of them, deep-brain stimulation (DBS) offers a way out, electrodes implanted deep in the brain deliver small electrical pulses that quiet the neural storm. But the most common surgical target, a structure called the anterior thalamic nucleus (ANT), comes with […]

Major depressive disorder has long been treated as a single diagnosis, but growing evidence suggests it may be a collection of biologically distinct conditions masquerading under one label. A new case-control study published in Molecular Psychiatry homes in on one such subgroup: patients whose depression is accompanied by REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), a condition […]

Lead. For decades, the only way to watch the brain’s sleep memory machinery in action was to go invasive. Hippocampal ripples, brief high-frequency bursts of neural activity that are considered essential for converting recent experiences into lasting memories, had been observed in humans only through electrodes implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients. That limitation […]

Lead. The past decade has brought a quiet revolution in narcolepsy pharmacotherapy. Pitolisant, solriamfetol, and orexin receptor agonists in the pipeline have expanded options beyond traditional stimulants and sodium oxybate. But a new Letter in Sleep Medicine by Carvalho Quintana and colleagues from the Federal University of São Paulo argues that this progress is incomplete […]