Sleep

Lead. Sleep problems are among the most common health complaints during adolescence, affecting up to 40% of teenagers. The relationship between poor sleep and emotional disorders is well established but poorly understood at the neural level. Not every adolescent with insomnia develops depression or anxiety, and clinicians have lacked reliable biological markers to distinguish those […]

Lead. Getting a reliable sleep assessment usually means spending a night in a lab wired to dozens of electrodes. Polysomnography (PSG), the gold standard for sleep staging and apnea diagnosis, is cumbersome, expensive, and ill-suited for routine screening or at-home use. Now a large international team has published results for BCGNet, a deep learning model […]

Lead. Getting a reliable sleep assessment usually means spending a night in a lab wired to dozens of electrodes. Polysomnography (PSG), the gold standard for sleep staging and apnea diagnosis, is cumbersome, expensive, and ill-suited for routine screening or at-home use. Now a large international team has published results for BCGNet, a deep learning model […]

Lead. Sleep is essential for recovery, yet critically ill children in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) may experience profound sleep disruption that goes unrecognized. A new observational study published in Acta Paediatrica provides the first comprehensive, age-adjusted comparison of sleep architecture in critically ill children versus non-critically ill controls, using full polysomnography. The findings […]

Lead. Sleep is increasingly recognized not as a passive rest state but as an active period of neural computation, during which the brain replays and consolidates memories through precisely timed oscillations. A new commentary in Epilepsy Currents by Jennifer N. Gelinas (University of California Irvine) asks whether we can harness this architecture therapeutically. Her piece, […]

Lead. Post-traumatic stress disorder remains one of the most challenging neuropsychiatric conditions to treat, particularly because its core symptoms, hyperarousal, nightmares, fear extinction deficits, and sleep disruption, feed into one another in a self-reinforcing loop that standard pharmacotherapy often fails to break. A scoping review published July 2 in Military Medicine (PMID: 42391109) now points […]

Lead. Researchers have shown that selectively disabling the circadian gene Clock in dopamine-producing neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) is sufficient to alter sleep patterns, behavior, and the electrical properties of those neurons in mice. The study, published as a preprint on bioRxiv, provides some of the most direct evidence to date linking Clock […]

Sleep EEG foundation models reveal within-stage microstructure that improves health screening beyond traditional stages For decades, sleep medicine has relied on a five-stage system to summarize an entire night of brain activity: wake, N1, N2, N3 (deep sleep), and REM. These stages are the language clinicians use to diagnose sleep disorders, assess sleep quality, and […]

Sleep deprivation damages every organ system, from brain to gut, comprehensive review finds Sleep deprivation is not merely a cause of daytime drowsiness. It is a systemic assault on the body that disrupts the nervous, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, immune, and endocrine systems simultaneously, according to a comprehensive review published in Frontiers in Neurology. The review, […]

NOTE: This article is based on a preprint (DOI: 10.64898/2026.01.06.697926) that has not yet undergone peer review. The findings should be considered preliminary until validated through the formal peer review process. Lead You have likely been told that a good night’s sleep helps you remember what you learned during the day. But the mechanism behind […]