Quality & disorders
Sleep apnea linked to about 2 more brain cancer cases per 1,000 people over 15 years
Aarhus University researchers compared 114,264 people with sleep apnea in Danish registries to the general population and to people with overweight or obesity. Only brain and spinal cord cancer stood out, and both stayed uncommon.
Sep 14, 2026
Sleep problems worsened years before a psychiatric diagnosis in working-age Swedes and partly eased after it
Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University researchers matched eight years of sleep surveys from about 25,000 Swedes to health registers. Mental fatigue had the strongest link to a later diagnosis, yet fewer than 3 in 100 got one.
Sep 14, 2026
Two kinds of sleep apnea that look alike in heart failure split apart once breathing control was measured
Which type of apnea a heart failure patient has decides their treatment, and the two are currently told apart by eye. Measuring 122 patients found the physiology underneath differs sharply.
Sep 8, 2026
Evening cycling protected memory after a short night, and deep sleep carried the effect
Sleeping badly and then needing to remember something is an ordinary predicament with no good remedy. Randomizing 88 adults to a single evening ride found one, and identified how it worked.
Sep 8, 2026
Having insomnia alongside sleep apnea tracked 34% more dementia over five years
Sleep apnea and insomnia are treated as separate problems by separate clinics, and a great many people have both. Comparing 51,043 matched pairs, the ones carrying both diagnoses developed more dementia than those with apnea alone.
Sep 2, 2026
Milk protein cut time spent awake in the night by 8 minutes in people whose sleep was already poor
The warm-milk folk remedy has never had much behind it. Pooling 11 randomized trials, milk-derived proteins and peptides improved the share of time in bed actually spent asleep, and the effect was largest in people with disturbed sleep.
Sep 1, 2026
Belly fat and sleep apnea each predicted the other over nine years, but only under 55
A Thorax analysis of the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort followed adults for a median nine years. Visceral obesity at baseline carried seven times the odds of developing sleep apnea, and sleep apnea predicted new visceral obesity in return.
Aug 28, 2026
Cannabinoids cut insomnia severity and added 34 minutes of sleep across 10 trials
A Sleep Medicine meta-analysis pooled 10 randomized trials and 2,134 people. Cannabinoids improved insomnia severity, sleep quality, total sleep time and efficiency against placebo or melatonin. Side effects were four times more common.
Aug 26, 2026
Acupuncture and massage moved insomnia by the same amount in advanced cancer
234 people with advanced cancer and insomnia got ten weeks of acupuncture or massage. Both improved by about 3.85 points on a 28-point scale. Neither arm was a placebo, so what the needles or the hands added is unknown.
Aug 24, 2026
A THC pill cut PTSD nightmares in a 171-person trial
A Nature Medicine trial gave 171 adults with PTSD either dronabinol or placebo nightly for ten weeks. Nightmares improved more on the drug. Seven serious adverse events occurred in that group and none on placebo.
Aug 17, 2026
In sleep apnea, waist beat BMI at predicting heart events
Among 2,662 people in the SAVE trial with sleep apnea and existing heart disease, 32% counted as obese by BMI. By waist-to-height ratio, 96% did. Only the waist measure tracked repeat cardiovascular events.
Aug 16, 2026
Morning people had more heart attacks, not fewer
In 4,578 adults from the Sleep Heart Health Study followed for a decade, both morning and evening types had higher rates of heart attack than the people in between. The pattern sat almost entirely in those with sleep apnea.
Aug 14, 2026
One all-nighter hit driving harder than four short nights
A trial in SLEEP put the same 20 men through a night with no sleep, four nights of two hours less, and normal sleep, then a simulated dawn commute. The all-nighter degraded lane control within minutes. The gradual loss barely showed.
Aug 9, 2026
Insomnia tracked death risk only when sleep was measured
In the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort, 767 adults were followed for a median of eight years. Insomnia with under six hours on an overnight recording carried 2.6 times the risk of dying. Insomnia with self-reported short sleep carried none.
Aug 8, 2026
Melatonin use in children tracked with less REM sleep
A JAMA Network Open study matched 342 pairs of children at a sleep clinic. Those prescribed melatonin had a lower share of REM sleep, and no other measure differed.
Aug 6, 2026
Women's night-time waking jumps sharply in midlife
A smartwatch study of 192,500 women across five countries found time spent awake after falling asleep rose 32% by the early sixties, a steeper climb than men saw.
Aug 6, 2026
Melatonin: uses, evidence, dosing and safety
Melatonin shifts the body clock rather than causing sleep, which is why it works well for jet lag and badly for ordinary insomnia. In adults it cuts time-to-sleep by about five minutes.
Aug 5, 2026
Short and long sleep both tracked with Alzheimer changes
Using brain scans from 38,816 UK Biobank participants, researchers found a U-shaped pattern: five to six hours and nine to ten hours both lined up with more Alzheimer-like shrinkage and worse test scores.
Aug 4, 2026
Unsteady breathing in sleep tracked death risk
Across 43,611 overnight sleep studies, researchers writing in the journal SLEEP tested a measure of how steadily people breathe at night and found it tracked death risk in two hospital cohorts, though not in the community one.
Aug 3, 2026
Nine measures of sleep, none predicted dementia
Researchers writing in Neurology boiled 44 sleep measurements down to nine composites across five US cohorts, then tested them against 1,134 dementia cases. Two tracked with better thinking scores. None tracked with dementia.
Aug 3, 2026
Broken sleep in perimenopause tracked worse thinking decades on
A study of 2,097 postmenopausal women in Menopause found the worst perimenopausal sleep went with lower cognitive scores years later, but only in women woken by symptoms.
Jul 31, 2026
A menopause sleep drug worked at week 4, then didn't
A SLEEP trial gave 110 postmenopausal women elinzanetant or placebo and measured sleep in a lab. The 22-minute advantage at four weeks had vanished by twelve.
Jul 29, 2026
Weak grip and low weight tracked with insomnia after 60
A SLEEP study of 5,824 older adults found low muscle strength and being underweight each tracked with insomnia, and together more than doubled the odds.
Jul 28, 2026
Online CBT for insomnia worked for autistic adults
A SLEEP randomized trial of 163 autistic adults found a 5-week internet CBT course cut insomnia severity substantially, with gains holding at six months.
Jul 27, 2026
Tonsil surgery helped snoring children, but not predictably
A SLEEP analysis of 363 children in a randomized trial found 65% improved after early tonsil surgery versus 39% who waited, yet almost nothing measured beforehand predicted who would benefit.
Jul 26, 2026
Sleep of 7 hours tracked 30% lower death risk by watch and 14% by self-report
Everyone is told to get seven hours, advice built from questionnaires. Following 76,811 UK adults who both wore a tracker and estimated their own sleep, the healthiest amount and the size of the benefit each shifted with the method.
Jul 25, 2026
Bedtime procrastination cost students 1.4 hours of sleep
Researchers wired a residential college with Bluetooth beacons and sleep watches for two weeks and found students who delayed bedtime to socialize slept 1.4 hours less and felt worse the next day.
Jul 25, 2026
Fecal transplant protocol improved sleep in chronic insomnia
In a trial of 80 adults with chronic insomnia, a gut-bacteria protocol beat placebo for sleep quality. It also included antibiotics, so the trial cannot say a stool transplant alone did it.
Jul 24, 2026