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Sleep study data could predict diseases years in advance

2026-01-08 08:06:00, Shëndeti CNA

Your body talks while you sleep, and what it says could help doctors predict your future risk for serious illness, a new study says.

An experimental artificial intelligence (AI) called SleepFM can use people's sleep data to predict their risk of developing more than 100 health problems, researchers reported Jan. 6 in the journal Nature Medicine.

The study reported that SleepFM excelled at predicting various diseases such as cancer, pregnancy complications, heart problems and mental disorders. It can also predict a person's overall risk of death, the researchers noted.

“SleepFM is essentially about learning the language of sleep,” co-senior researcher James Zou, an associate professor of biomedical data science at Stanford Medicine, said in a press release.

The researchers trained the artificial intelligence with over 585,000 hours of sleep data from 65,000 people whose sleep was monitored at a sleep center.

These comprehensive sleep assessments record brain activity, heart activity, breathing, leg movements, eye movements and more, the researchers said.

The team then used long-term data from the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center to link sleep patterns to health risks. About 35,000 patients went to the center for sleep assessments and were followed for up to 25 years.

SleepFM analyzed more than 1,000 disease categories in patients' health records and found 130 that could be predicted with reasonable accuracy from their sleep data, the researchers said.

They used a statistic called the C-index, or compatibility index, to test the AI's ability to predict diseases. A C-index of 0.8 or higher indicates that it can predict diseases accurately.

SleepFM predictions were particularly strong regarding Parkinson's disease (C-index 0.89), dementia (0.85); hypertensive heart disease (0.84); heart attack (0.81); prostate cancer (0.89); breast cancer (0.87); and death (0.84).

The team found that there was some interaction between the heart and the head during sleep.

Heart signals during sleep were more important in predicting heart disease, while brain signals did so in predicting mental health, the researchers said. However, combining all the data that came in produced the most accurate predictions.

The team is now working on ways to further improve SleepFM's predictions, perhaps by adding data from other devices such as wearables.

Researchers are also trying to better understand what SleepFM is considering when making its predictions./ CNA