New medications for insomnia and more awareness of disorders like sleep apnea give new hope to millions, reports The Miami Herald.

“The old approach said, ‘Let’s increase the transmitters that help our brain go to sleep.’ But the new drugs are looking at it from a different side of the equation,” Seiden said. “Now let’s give a drug that shuts the waking part of the brain. The neurotransmitter responsible for this is orexin, a relatively newly discovered neurotransmitter.”