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Hidden signals in sleep can predict future health

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From a single night of sleep, AI tools can uncover physiological patterns linked to disease and mortality that are missed by conventional sleep measures.

By

  1. Rachel K. Rowe

    1. Rachel K. Rowe is in the Department of Integrative Physiology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80301, USA.

Sleep is essential for health, and disrupted sleep is a common feature of many diseases1. Growing evidence suggests that changes in sleep can emerge before a disease is diagnosed2,3, raising the possibility that sleep contains early signals of future health. Two publications from this year — one in Nature Communications by Bilal et al.4 and one in Nature Medicine by Thapa et al.5 — suggest that sleep data hold substantially more information about health than clinicians and researchers currently extract from them.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03207-8

References

  1. Shah, A. S. et al. Am. J. Lifestyle Med. https://doi.org/10.1177/15598276251346752 (2025).

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  2. Ramos, A. R., Wheaton, A. G. & Johnson, D. A. Prev. Chronic Dis. 20, E77 (2023).

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  3. Mannino, G. S., Baumann, C. R., Opp, M. R. & Rowe, R. K. Neurotrauma Rep. 6, 482–490 (2025).

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  4. Bilal, E. et al. Nature Commun. 17, 7603 (2026).

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  5. Thapa, R. et al. Nature Med. 32, 752–762 (2026).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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