The pursuit of mechanistic links between sleep disturbances and pain: are we getting warmer?

Daniel Whibley, Tiffany J Braley

Sleep, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2023, zsad092, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsad092

Published:

31 March 2023

Sleep disturbances are important potential drivers of pain onset, severity, and persistence [1]. Consequently, sleep health is being increasingly recognized as a foundational component of interventions to prevent or alleviate chronic pain. However, findings regarding biological mechanisms that could explain the effect of sleep disturbances on pain sensitization and/or inhibition remain scant, and carefully designed studies to elucidate neurobiological and immunologic underpinnings are sorely needed. The elegant study by Haack et al. in this issue of SLEEP provides early but promising evidence to fortify the tenability of previously proposed mechanistic pathways that link sleep and pain [2]. Sex-differential effects are also highlighted that, if replicated, hold pivotal clinical importance given the higher prevalence of chronic pain conditions consistently observed among women [3–5].