AI and the World's Hard Problems · Medicine & drug discovery · Nature (machine learning) · 2026-10-12
Hidden signals in sleep can predict future health
AI tools can extract physiological patterns from a single night of sleep that conventional sleep measures miss, and these patterns are linked to disease and mortality. Two recent papers, in Nature Communications and Nature Medicine, suggest sleep data hold far more health information than clinicians and researchers currently extract. Growing evidence also indicates that sleep changes can appear before a disease is diagnosed.