Mount Sinai researchers found that reduced REM sleep and increased light sleep signal active inflammation and upcoming flares in inflammatory bowel disease patients, even when symptoms are absent.
Key takeaways:
- Mount Sinai researchers used wearable devices to track sleep patterns in over 100 IBD patients for an average of seven months to assess the link between sleep and inflammation.
- Significant sleep metric changes, specifically reduced REM and increased light sleep, occurred only during active inflammation; symptoms alone did not cause objective sleep disruption.
- Sleep disturbances were found to worsen in the six weeks leading up to a flare, suggesting sleep data could serve as an early warning signal for disease activity.
- The study highlights the potential for consumer-grade wearables to provide non-invasive, continuous monitoring for chronic disease management.
Mount Sinai researchers have published a study demonstrating that objective sleep disturbances in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are directly linked to inflammation rather than symptoms alone, offering a potential noninvasive method to predict disease flares.
The findings, published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, reveal that significant changes in sleep metrics—specifically reduced REM sleep and increased light sleep—occurred only when inflammation was present in the body. Conversely, reported symptoms alone did not result in notable objective sleep disruption.
IBD, a category including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, is characterized by digestive tract inflammation. While poor sleep is a common complaint among these patients, previous research relied heavily on short-term studies and subjective assessments, leaving it unclear whether sleep issues stemmed from symptoms, underlying inflammation, or both.
To address this, researchers assessed sleep data from more than 100 participants with IBD. Participants wore commercially available devices, such as Apple Watches, Fitbits, and Oura Rings, for an average of more than seven months. The team analyzed sleep stages, the percentage of time spent asleep while in bed, and total sleep hours, alongside daily symptom surveys and laboratory inflammation markers.
The study included longitudinal mapping of objective sleep patterns before, during, and after disease exacerbations. By analyzing data from six weeks before and six weeks after flare episodes, the researchers observed that sleep disturbances significantly worsened leading up to inflammatory flares and improved afterward.
“This is the first study to longitudinally map objective sleep patterns before, during, and after IBD flares using wearable technologies—offering a new, non-invasive way to monitor disease activity and explore how poor sleep and inflammation are connected,” says corresponding author Robert Hirten, MD, associate professor of medicine (gastroenterology) and artificial intelligence and human health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a release. “Our findings are crucial because they suggest that poor sleep may be related to active inflammatory disease, even when patients are not reporting symptoms. This approach opens new possibilities for how wearable devices can monitor health events and track sleep in chronic diseases.”
The authors note that these findings validate the utility of consumer-grade wearable devices for continuous, passive sleep observation. This could facilitate real-time disease monitoring, offering an alternative to traditional inflammation monitoring methods that require invasive or inconvenient testing, such as bloodwork or stool samples.
