Sleep

Lead. For people living with narcolepsy, managing symptoms goes well beyond medication. A new qualitative study from Slovak researchers reveals how patients develop a rich toolkit of behavioral strategies, psychological coping mechanisms, and social supports to navigate daily life with the disorder, and finds that for some, these non-pharmacological approaches may substantially reduce or even […]

Lead. Getting more sleep may do more than boost alertness — it could fundamentally lower your risk of developing epilepsy, according to a major new study that combines human genetic analysis with laboratory experiments in stem cells and mice. Researchers from Tianjin Medical University and Huanhu Hospital in China found that genetically predicted longer sleep […]

Lead. A new prospective study from Japan adds strong evidence that sleep disturbances are an independent risk factor for suicidal thoughts, and that the link persists even after controlling for depression, a known confound. The findings suggest that treating sleep problems could be a distinct and modifiable pathway for suicide prevention. Published in Archives of […]

REM-suppressing antidepressants linked to improved survival in ALS patients ALS patients who were prescribed antidepressants that suppress REM sleep showed modestly better survival rates than those on other antidepressants, according to a large retrospective cohort study published in Neurological Sciences. But the authors caution the association is statistically fragile and may reflect differences in why […]

Lead. A narrative review published this month in CNS & Neurological Disorders Drug Targets examines the neuropsychiatric risks of zolpidem, one of the most widely prescribed hypnotics worldwide, and weighs them against emerging alternatives such as orexin receptor antagonists and melatonin-based therapies. The authors, a team from Desh Bhagat University in Punjab, India, argue that […]

Lead. For decades, sleep disturbances in Alzheimer’s disease have been blamed on amyloid plaques, the sticky protein clumps that accumulate between neurons. A study published July 20 in Alzheimer’s & Dementia turns that assumption on its head. Researchers at the University of Kentucky show that the real culprit is not the plaques themselves but the […]

A small randomized crossover trial from researchers in Spain and the United States suggests that sleeping extra hours on the weekend does not fully undo the metabolic and cardiovascular consequences of a week of insufficient sleep. After five nights of restricted sleep followed by two days of unrestricted recovery, participants still showed elevated triglycerides and […]

A Transdiagnostic Tool for Sleep Medicine Sleep medicine depends on patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) to complement clinical interviews and objective tests such as polysomnography. Yet the questionnaires available today have significant shortcomings. Many focus on isolated symptoms or single disorders, which limits their ability to capture the full complexity of sleep conditions that patients actually […]

Procrastination is independently tied to sleep disturbance, and this association is partly explained by a tendency toward eveningness, being a night owl, according to a cross-sectional study of nearly 3,000 Japanese adults published in Sleep Medicine. The link between putting things off and sleeping poorly has been noted before, but it was unclear whether the […]

Researchers in Iran have launched a clinical trial to test whether time-restricted eating outperforms standard calorie-restricted dieting on measures of circadian rhythm health, sleep quality, and clock gene expression in women with obesity. The 12-week randomized trial, led by investigators at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences and Tehran University of Medical Sciences, will enroll 42 […]