Sleep

A woman with obstructive sleep apnea wakes repeatedly through the night, her breathing interrupted sometimes hundreds of times. Over time, that same woman may also find herself making urgent, frequent trips to the bathroom, often before she has even fully surfaced from sleep. The connection between these two conditions, a breathing disorder that suffocates sleep […]

A patient walks into a prosthodontist’s office for the second time in two years. The porcelain veneer on her left molar has chipped again. The implant crown on the opposite side feels loose. She brushes twice a day, flosses, sees her general dentist every six months. By every conventional measure, her oral hygiene is impeccable. […]

A good night’s sleep is surprisingly hard to study. The gold standard, polysomnography, requires a patient to spend a night in a lab with electrodes glued to the scalp, face, chest, and legs, plus belts around the torso and a pulse oximeter on the finger. The setup is expensive, uncomfortable, and impractical for the kind […]

The gardenia flower is best known for its creamy white petals and sweet fragrance. But inside the fruit of this evergreen shrub lies a compound that, according to new research, may hold clues for treating one of Parkinson’s disease’s most overlooked symptoms. In a preprint posted July 21 on bioRxiv, neuroscientists at Haverford College report […]

Better Sleep May Boost Weight Loss Success, Systematic Review Suggests The relationship between sleep and weight is more nuanced than many people realize. A new systematic review finds that while getting enough sleep matters, how you feel about your sleep and how efficiently you sleep may be even more important for shedding pounds. Researchers at […]

Circadian Disruption Alters Rhythmic Gene Expression in the Hippocampus Without Changing Overall Levels New research in rats shows that environmental circadian disruption rewrites the daily rhythm of clock and memory genes in the hippocampus without altering how much of those genes are expressed. The finding suggests that cognitive deficits linked to shift work and jet […]

Lead. Every night we sleep, our brains perform a deep clean. Cerebrospinal fluid washes through neural tissue, flushing out metabolic waste products that accumulate during waking hours, including the proteins amyloid-beta and tau that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. This waste removal system, known as the glymphatic system, has emerged as one of the most […]

Theoretical chronobiology of circadian timing, gold mine or minefield? A new perspective from researchers at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin asks whether the mathematical abstractions that made modern circadian science possible have also started to obscure what matters most. When a fruit fly wakes at dawn, when a shift worker’s body fights an […]

Lead We have all known someone who seems immune to sleep loss. They pull an all-nighter, show up the next morning, and still function. Then there is the rest of us who, after one bad night, struggle to keep our eyes open, let alone think clearly. Why do some people handle sleep deprivation better than […]

Lead. Anyone who has pulled an all-nighter knows that sleep loss can make the whole body ache. But the brain wiring that turns missed sleep into physical pain has remained a black box, until now. A study published July 20 in Cell Reports identifies, for the first time, a specific three-part brain circuit that drives […]