If solved
Sleep medicine by mechanism
Once sleep's job is known, doctors can test what a patient's sleep fails to do and treat that cause.
Open in the interactive tree →Knowing what sleep is for would let doctors measure whether a person's sleep achieves it, not just how long it lasts. Treatments would target the failing function, whether repair, reset or clearance. Overnight recordings would become routine early warnings for conditions such as dementia.
What it brings
- Personal sleep prescriptions based on measured need
- Targeted treatment of insomnia and sleep disorders
- Early detection of brain disease from sleep recordings
- Shift-work and travel schedules that protect health
Prerequisites
- REM sleep discovered1953Sleep medicine is built on scoring sleep stages, starting with REM
- What sleep is foropen
- Mechanism-based psychiatry2040s?