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Sleep in the Developing Brain With Dr. Kristin Seaborg Sep 23, 2026

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Sleep plays a critical role in brain development, learning, memory, and behavior throughout childhood and adolescence. In this episode, Dr. Kristin Seaborg discusses how sleep architecture changes across development, the impact of sleep disorders on attention, headaches, epilepsy, and neurodevelopmental conditions, and why neurologists should routinely assess sleep in pediatric patients. Learn practical approaches to recognizing sleep problems, including obstructive sleep apnea and insomnia, and how improving sleep can enhance neurologic and cognitive outcomes. In this episode, Casey S. Albin, MD, FAAN, speaks with Kristin Seaborg, MD, author of the article "Sleep in the Developing Brain" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Albin is a Continuum® Audio interviewer, associate editor of media engagement, and an assistant professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Seaborg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. Additional Resources Read the article: Sleep in the Developing Brain Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @caseyalbin Guest: @KristinSeaborg Full episode transcript available here Dr Albin: In neurology and life, we are all looking for the secret to being attentive, focused, and engaged, and we certainly want that for our children. And what if the answer to all of that was just in sleep? Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Albin: Hello, this is Dr. Casey Albin. Today I'm interviewing Dr. Kristin Seaborg about her article on sleep in the developing brain. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on the neurology of sleep. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Seaborg. Thank you so much for being here. I learned a lot from your article. Can you just briefly introduce yourself to the audience? Dr Seaborg: Sure. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. My name is Kristin Seaborg. I'm a pediatric neurologist and sleep neurologist at the University of Wisconsin Medicine. I also run the pediatric sleep neurology clinic at UW Madison. Dr Albin: That is the perfect person to be writing this article. And every time I read an article about pediatric neurology, I am just so struck that like little tiny humans are not small adults, that they actually have a totally different neurobiology. They are in different stages of development. And this was really a topic that I was not familiar with, and probably for most of our listeners, they're not familiar with as well. And so, I thought we'd maybe just start with some of the basics. What is going on in terms of like pediatric sleep architecture, and how is that different than the adult architecture that we might be m- more familiar with? Dr Seaborg: Sure. So, a lot of us think that sleep is the thing we do that when, when we're not doing other stuff. But actually, it's completely the opposite. During sleep, our brain is learning and consolidating memory and cleansing what's happened during the day, and that's especially important during infancy and early childhood development, and as a child gets older. If we take infants for an example, fifty percent of their sleep is in a precursor of REM sleep, which we call active sleep, which is much, much more than adults, as opposed to adults have about thirty percent of their sleep in REM sleep. And also, infants need sleep like fifteen to seventeen hours a day. Not all of that is consolidated in one continuous period. They usually sleep over the course of the day, fifteen to seventeen hours, and that sleep time decreases over the course of childhood and adolescence as well. Dr Albin: Yeah, it's amazing that there's so much more going on. As someone who's had newborns, it feels like, oh my gosh, they're really just sleeping all day. They're not doing anything. But they're doing quite a lot, and that really is so much work for their developing brain. And then one of the things that also really struck me about the article is that as children move from infancy through adolescence, not only is the sleep architecture changing, but the time they go to sleep, the amount of sleep they need, some of the pathology that they may develop, it changes throughout these early years of their life. And so maybe when we are thinking about what patients might come to the clinic with, I assume a lot of parents are kind of concerned like, "Is my child getting enough sleep? Are they sleeping the normal amount? Are they sleeping in the timeframe that would be normal?" Walk us through just in broad strokes, like what is a normal amount of sleep as you go through that pediatric developmental phase? Dr Seaborg: So that's not a one-sentence answer. And there's a table in the Continuum article. Dr Albin: Love that. Dr Seaborg: So, infants sleep like fifteen to seventeen hours, and it's chunked out over the course of the day. Usually they have one consolidated sleep period at night, but then two to three naps during the day. And as you move through early childhood, toddlers and adolescents usually need about fourteen hours of sleep around the time they're one year of age. As they get a little bit older, then they need like eleven to thirteen hours, depending on the child themselves. And then as we move toward like school age, like eight to ten hours of sleep is usually adequate, but especially younger school children need about ten hours of sleep at night. And then the interesting thing that happens in adolescence and early teenage years is that kids need just as much sleep, but they actually naturally fall asleep later because their melatonin is released later. So, it feels like they need to sleep all the time, but actually they just go to sleep later, and when school comes, it's not time or doesn't feel ready for them to wake up. So, adolescents and teens also need about eight to ten hours of sleep a night. Dr Albin: Right. And I just was struck, you know, we think about it in this article and these issues, we've thought a lot about, I think it'll come up in other podcasts, the importance of daylight savings time and how that actually really is not good for our brains. And I feel so much for these teenagers who are really at a disadvantage because we make them get up early to participate in the world when it's not really aligned with how their natural sleep cycle is, and it feels unfair. Dr Seaborg: It does. And there's so much to that. So, adolescents have school, and then a lot of time they have like after-school activities, whether that's sports or theater or music or whatever, but that usually happens after school. And then the reality of today's society is they come home, and at least my teenager disconnects or kind of decompresses by looking at her phone forever. And a lot of teenagers and adolescents bring their phone to bed. That exposure to light right up until the time when they want to go to sleep really can disrupt their circadian rhythm too. So they have the natural delayed circadian rhythm, and then they have these lifestyle exposures between activities after school and screens and everything else that really make sleep onset difficult. And so, waking up for school at 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning is really difficult for them. Dr Albin: Gosh, I feel for that. And I suspect that many patients are coming into the sleep clinic with that exact sort of like my early teen, my preteen, my teenager. They're just exhausted all the time, but they won't fall asleep. They're developing insomnia. It sounds like there's a lot of behavioral changes that need to go along with that. Is that what you're seeing? Dr Seaborg: Yeah. So, I'm also seeing an kind of a corollary, a lot of kids that come in with headaches because they're not sleeping enough, and they feel awful, or they're coming in with difficulty focusing in school or cognitive fog because they're not sleeping enough, and that they don't always know that that's the chief complaint. But often, as you start asking sleep-related questions, you figure out exactly what's going on. So, their amount they're sleeping and kind of their natural sleep cycle is affecting everything about their life. Dr Albin: Yeah. It just-- it really struck me that, you know, one of the things that you talk about in the article is that there is, in patients who have neurodevelopmental differences and disorders, they may specifically have some sleep impairment, and they have a neurobiological reason for those sleep changes. But also, like you're saying, sometimes these inattentions or what's diagnosed as ADHD is actually just because they are not sleeping well, and they can't focus. And I imagine that's really hard to tease out. Like, is there something when you're trying to tease that out in the clinic that helps you figure out, is it the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog? Dr Seaborg: Sure. Dr Albin: Which is coming first? Is it, is it really a neurobiology problem where they have nerve developmental disorders and therefore sleep problems, or they have sleep problems causing the symptoms of a nerve developmental disorder? Dr Seaborg: So, there's so many ways to answer that question. The very first part is you start at the beginning, not only asking the person's chief complaint, like, "Are you having trouble with attention?" But then also, uh, like I'll say, "Okay, what time do you go to sleep?" But not only that, "What are you doing before bedtime?" And then once they're asleep, are they snoring? Are they waking multiple times at night, you know, without trying to? And when they wake up in the morning, do they feel refreshed, or do they really still feel like they could fall asleep for a very, very long time? And then with regards to the neurodevelopmental disorders, it's fascinating. A lot of kids with neurodevelopmental disorders, whether that's ADHD or autism spectrum disorder or a genetic disorder that causes a developmental difference, often some of the pathophysiology of the actual neurodevelopmental difference also impacts the circadian rhythm and melatonin release and the brain's ability to initiate and maintain sleep. So, it's really important as a provider to be cognizant if you're seeing your patient with autism or ADHD to also ask about their sleep-related symptoms. And then eventually you'll ferret it out, but it takes a lot of sleuth work and investigation. Dr Albin: So, what I'm hearing is actually when people come in with a chief complaint that probably is not like, "Hey, I'm having trouble sleeping," but maybe, "I can't focus" or, "I have headaches," or I have other problems that are being referred to a neurologist or pediatric neurologist, it really does behoove us to pause and take a good sleep history on all children coming in. Dr Seaborg: Yes, and I'm gonna piggyback on that. Also, very, very important for our patients with epilepsy. There's a super high coincidence with epilepsy and sleep disorders, and there's actually been direct comparisons with children that-- typically developing children and children with epilepsy that's poorly controlled, and the amount of sleep-related complaints and sleep-related symptoms they have is astronomically higher. So, it's important as a neurologist to always have sleep kind of on our front burner, something we're paying attention to. Dr Albin: No, it's so true. You know, I learned a lot about pediatric sleep and epilepsy through the article, and I think that obviously we wanna refer the listeners to checking out a little bit more. But there were a couple of things that were new terms to me that maybe others are not familiar with, and it does relate to like they are epilepsy, but they are more nocturnal, and they have more nocturnal epilepsies that we might need to really think and consciously consider. So, the new terms for me were SeLECTS, which I assume is actually just said as SeLECTS, but stands for... You tell me, what does it stand for? Dr Seaborg: Self-limited epilepsy with central temporal spikes. Dr Albin: Perfect. So okay. So, let's just start with that. Like, what is going on there? What do I need to know about it? Dr Seaborg: So, SeLECTS was previously known as benign rolandic epilepsy 10 to 20 years ago, and then that, the term evolved to childhood epilepsy with central temporal spikes. But then it evolved again to SeLECTS, which is self-limited epilepsy with central temporal spikes. I think the primary motivation of changing the terminology, at least initially, was to acknowledge that even though this type of epilepsy occurs during childhood and it's self-limited, it is not benign always because seizures can cause some daytime dysfunction, and also there has been some association with ADHD-like symptoms or learning disability symptoms later in life. The other term you just mentioned, developmental epileptic encephalopathy with spike wave activation in sleep. That's a mouthful. That's the new terminology for what we used to call ESES or electrical status epilepticus of slow wave sleep. So, DEE-SWAS, developmental epileptic encephalopathy with spike wave activation in sleep is a broader term to encompass a bunch of epilepsy syndromes that have spike wave activation that during sleep, it is associated with developmental delay and per-perhaps developmental regression. Dr Albin: And is that typically seen early childhood infancy? Like, I think of that as being something that you're gonna encounter really early in the life cycle. Am I correct? Dr Seaborg: Not always. Sometimes, like school-aged children, one of the classic presentations is what it can be known as Landau-Kleffner syndrome, where you have spike wave activation during sleep in a, a school-aged child at like between the ages of six and 10, and then they have language regression, and you look at their EEG overnight and you see that they have epileptiform activity for up to 85 to 95% of the night. Dr Albin: Wow. So, I wanna drill down on this. Since both of these things may come up, and probably are not something that the family is coming to you and saying, "Hey, I've seen these bizarre things happen in sleep," but are coming with daytime symptoms, how is it that you decide who is going to need a pediatric sleep study? Dr Seaborg: Great question. So, if a child ever or a parent ever comes and complains or with concerns of developmental regression, and I guess I'm biased cause I'm a sleep doctor, but I would always do an EEG recording overnight if there were any concerns. And then if patients come and they just talk about rhythmic movements at night or waking up at night with some facial twitching, or the next day they're really acting tired, then I would order a sleep study. And of course, I would always ask the typical questions: Are they snoring? Are they waking up with a headache or not well refreshed? And ask a little bit more about a sleep history. But developmental regression and rhythmic…

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Circadian Neurology With Dr. Sabra M. Abbott Sep 16, 2026

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Circadian rhythms influence far more than sleep, affecting neurologic disease expression, treatment response, and overall health. In this episode, Dr. Sabra Abbott discusses common circadian rhythm disorders, the health consequences of circadian misalignment, and practical strategies for managing jet lag, shift work, and disrupted sleep-wake schedules. Learn how circadian biology can shape neurologic outcomes and why considering the timing of behaviors, light exposure, and treatments may improve patient care. In this episode, Katie Grouse, MD, FAAN, speaks with Sabra M. Abbott, MD, PhD, author of the article "Circadian Neurology" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Grouse is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a clinical assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco in San Francisco, California. Dr. Abbott is an Associate Professor of Neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. Additional Resources Read the article: Circadian Neurology Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Full episode transcript available here Dr Grouse: Circadian rhythm disruption affects many of our patients in far-reaching aspects of their general health and has likely personally affected most neurologists at some point in their career. Today, I have the opportunity to interview Dr. Sabra Abbott, who is the author of the latest issue of Continuum on Neurology of Sleep. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Grouse: This is Dr. Katie Grouse. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Sabra Abbott about her article on circadian neurology. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on Neurology of Sleep. Welcome to the podcast, and please introduce yourself to our audience. Dr Abbott: Thanks for having me. I'm Dr. Sabra Abbott. I'm an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern, and I'm also director of our circadian medicine clinic. Dr Grouse: It's really great to have you today. I definitely enjoyed reading your article, and not only did I learn a lot, but I feel like it's really applicable to a lot of topics that come up in clinic when I see patients. Now, I was wondering if you had to choose one key point that readers of your article would take away after reading it, what would it be? Dr Abbott: I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that time is an important variable in every single thing that we do. And so, it can impact when your patient's disease is at its best and at its worst, and then it also can impact when it's actually most appropriate to provide medications for your patients. There can be times where they may be more impactful and times where they may actually cause more harm for your patients. So, the short answer is think about time always with your patients. Dr Grouse: On that topic, I was really amazed to learn about the significant health risks associated with circadian misalignment, including even malignancy risks. Can you review some of these risks and why this might be the case? Dr Abbott: So, I think the risk that we have the most data for is the risk for cancer associated with circadian misalignment, and this comes from a lot of studies that we're looking at patients who are shift workers. The data has actually come back on two separate reviews indicating that shift work could be a probable carcinogen, and we think that that probably comes down to a lot of different factors. So, when you're a shift worker, you are often working in the middle of the night. You may be getting light exposure at a time when you're normally producing melatonin, and that may be one factor that is actually putting you at increased risk for cancer. Dr Grouse: And certainly, after reading this and hearing all of these things, I'm not surprised that many sleep specialists really dislike daylight savings time, which also is enough of a factor to potentially increase some of these health risks. Do you agree that daylight savings time is something that's contributing to poor health in our population? Dr Abbott: So, I think it is definitely something that almost all of us want to get rid of, and I think where everybody is in agreement is that we should get rid of these shifts in the spring and the fall. I think the only benefit to those shifts that I see is it does create a time where we start having conversations about your circadian clock, so people become aware of circadian timing twice a year when we have these shifts. Outside of that, that shift back and forth seems to be very problematic. So, we do see both in the fall and the spring an increased risk for car crashes, an increased risk for heart attacks, stroke. People perform worse at work, and so I think in general, we probably should get rid of it. There's a little bit of a debate as to whether we should go to permanent standard time or permanent daylight saving time. I think most sleep and circadian scientists prefer permanent standard time. A lot of people who really like their evening activities prefer permanent daylight saving time, but I think that's also biased by the fact that daylight saving time, everybody has longer days, and I think they want longer days year-round, and you don't get that no matter which way you shift the clock in the winter. Dr Grouse: That's really interesting. I do see that debate pop up every, I guess twice every year, and I guess there is a silver lining that at least we are all talking about it and thinking about it. I wanted to take a step back about the topic of circadian rhythm disorders in general. Could you just really quickly, like twenty-thousand-foot view, summarize what these main circadian rhythm disorders are? Dr Abbott: So, at the moment, we primarily think of circadian rhythm disorders in the context of how they impact your sleep-wake timing. And so, at the largest level, we think of them as either intrinsic disorders, so disorders where your internal timing doesn't match up with the environment. The four key disorders there are advanced and delayed sleep wake phase disorders, so you're either earlier or later. You have non-twenty-four, where you actually generally get later and later each day, so it's like you're living on Mars. And then we have irregular, where you have multiple bouts of sleep that happen both night and day. And then the other two are the extrinsic disorders, so these are shift work disorders. So, you may have a normal functioning clock, but the external environment is forcing you to do things you wouldn't normally, or jet lag, where you again have a normal functioning clock, but then you end up having to shift multiple time zones faster than you can adapt to. Now, I think the interesting thing, and we can talk about this more if you want, is that we are moving into thinking of circadian rhythm disorders as being much more than just abnormalities of sleep-wake timing, and I think that's kind of where the future of the field goes. Dr Grouse: Tell me more about that. Dr Abbott: So, I think as the article gets into beyond just these kind of classically recognized disorders, we realize that circadian disruption can play a role in almost any other medical disorder that you can experience. And so, we can see circadian disruption as either a symptom or a potential cause of many other disorders. And then also in the optimal care of pretty much any patient, thinking about all of these other factors that they're experiencing on a day-to-day basis, whether it's their light exposure, whether it's the timing of their meals, whether it's the timing of their medications, all of those can play a role in their overall health and improving your ability to care for them. Dr Grouse: Now, I did find it really fascinating. This was not something that I had really been aware of prior to reading your article about the fact that it really can make a difference about when you time particular medications for particular types of neurologic conditions just related to the circadian rhythm. And really interesting was the epilepsy connection. Can you tell me about how that affects how we should be dosing anti-seizure medication? Dr Abbott: So, I think the epilepsy connection is an interesting one that definitely needs far more studies. So, at this point, a lot of this data is really coming from observational studies, looking at when patients have received medications and then how good their outcomes are. And in epilepsy, I think a lot of us tend to time anti-seizure medications so that patients get more of them in the evening and lower doses during the daytime. And I think a lot of this has been driven a little bit more by the fact that many of these medications are sedating, so we tend to put the more sedating medications at bedtime. But it turns out that outcomes in patients are actually better if they get higher doses at night and lower doses in the morning. Now, this is sort of theorizing at this point, but it could either be targets of these medications or your ability to uptake these medications across the blood-brain barrier may change with the time of day component. So, at this point, these are still really observational studies, but I think an area where we really need to do a lot more work. Dr Grouse: Well, I look forward to hearing more about other ways that we'll learn how best to manage our medications for circadian rhythm function. Now, I wanted to ask, which circadian rhythm disorder do you think is the hardest to treat, and why would that be the case? Dr Abbott: So, I'm gonna give you two answers to that. In terms of the primary circadian disorders that I see come through my clinic door, I would say cited non-24. These are patients who have normal vision, but they act as though they are living in a world without these external light time cues. And so, they, every single day, get a little bit later and a little bit later, and it's really, really hard to get them from a 25-hour schedule back onto a 24-hour schedule. The second part of my answer to that is shift work disorder, and those, I would say, are much more common patients to encounter. I think every single one of us, as we've gone through our medical training, has probably had some degree of shift work disorder, difficulty sleeping when we need to, staying awake during our shifts. But it's still really hard to figure out what we should be doing because, one, it's a multi-component system, so anything that I do to change your shift schedule has trickle-down effects to every one of your coworkers, and so we can't just tell one person, "Change what you're doing." It's also really hard to figure out what we should be doing. Should you only be working nights forever and ever and become purely nocturnal, and should we adapt everything to that, or we-- should we find some sort of compromise so that you can work the night shift but still have time to socialize and spend time with your family during the daytime? And how do we do all of that while still optimizing your health? And so, I think from a patient population, that is really a large problem we don't have a good answer to yet. Dr Grouse: Sounds like it's something that you really have to customize to every single patient who walks in and their, their particular scenarios. Dr Abbott: Absolutely. Dr Grouse: Jet lag disorders is another circadian rhythm disorder that I think we all have had some personal experience with. Any tips or tricks on how to manage jet lag going east or west, or any resources that you recommend that can help us manage this, or we can advise to our patients? Dr Abbott: Yeah. When we're talking about individualized, personalized treatment, I would say jet lag absolutely is way up there at the top of the list because it's not only a matter of where do you currently go to sleep and wake up in your current time zone, it is how many time zones are you going across to get to where you're going? Do you wanna keep the same schedule when you're at the new time zone? And all of these other factors in terms of how long you're gonna be there. When are you gonna come back? Does it make sense to fully adapt yourself to that new schedule? With that in mind, the general tips are if you are heading east, generally your goal is to shift everything earlier, and if you're heading west, generally the goal is to shift everything later. There are a lot of online calculators you can use where you can put in your current time zone, your destination time zone, and it will give you very specific information about when you should be getting light, when you should be avoiding light When melatonin may be helpful as another time cue that can help shift you. But again, it really depends on which direction and how many time zones and what time you're gonna arrive. I would say the practical tip that I have is whatever you do when you get to the new time zone, um, most of the time international travel involves overnight flights, so you may arrive in the morning. Resist the temptation to take a nap as soon as you arrive because that's just gonna make things harder and harder to adapt to. So, get out, be active, eat on the new time zone, try to push through that day, and then the homeostatic drive for sleep is gonna help you through that first night. Dr Grouse: Great tip, and definitely a tip I have failed to follow in past trips and regretted greatly afterwards. There were some other really great points that you made that as an ambulatory neurologist I hadn't thought of that was really, really helpful, including when we take care of patients in the hospital, of course, we-- we're always careful about, you know, potential sort of things we can do to minimize delirium. But in fact, there's probably a lot of things we can do to minimize disruption to circadian rhythms, which we already know that if we're not careful about, can be deleterious to health. What are some things that you recommend generally for patients who are admitted regarding monitoring and treatment that we can try to do to mitigate that effect? Dr Abbott: So, I would say the number one most important thing that you can do, and I did this every single day when I was on the wards, is when you walk into the patient's room for rounds in the morning, turn on the lights, open the curtains. We did an interesting study a few years ago because there was all of this discussion of nighttime disruption to hospital patients and a lot of concern that they were getting too much light and too much interruption to their sleep at night. But what we found out was actually the bigger problem may be that none of our patients are getting light during the daytime, and so they've just lost that amplitude of light rhythm. And so as much as you can maximize daytime and opening those curtains, turning on the lights, giving them a bunch of light during the day. And then obviously, on the opposite end, you wanna make sure that they're getting dark at nighttime. Being really thoughtful about what your patients actually need to have done while they're in the hospital. And so, do they really need to have vitals every four hours in the middle of the night? Is that gonna…

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Hypersomnia With Dr. Margaret Kay-Stacey Sep 09, 2026

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Hypersomnia encompasses a group of disorders characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness that can significantly impair quality of life and neurologic function. In this episode, Dr. Margaret Kay-Stacey discusses how to recognize and evaluate hypersomnia, reviews key features of narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia, and highlights the many neurologic conditions associated with excessive sleepiness. Learn practical approaches to diagnosis, treatment, and distinguishing primary hypersomnia disorders from more common causes such as insufficient sleep, sleep apnea, medications, and depression. In this episode, Gordon Smith, MD, FAAN, speaks with Margaret Kay-Stacey, MD, author of the article "Hypersomnia" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Smith is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a professor and chair of neurology at Kenneth and Dianne Wright Distinguished Chair in Clinical and Translational Research at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Dr. Kay-Stacey is an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Ambulatory Medical Director at the University of Chicago Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois. Additional Resources Read the article: Hypersomnia Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @GordonSmithMD Full episode transcript available here Dr Smith: So, what do myotonic dystrophy, Parkinson's disease, and traumatic brain injury have in common? It turns out that each can cause clinically significant and meaningful hypersomnolence. And did you know that narcolepsy has the same population prevalence in the United States as myasthenia gravis, something I commonly see in clinic? If you want to learn more about hypersomnolence and how it impacts the patients you care for and what to do about it, keep listening. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Smith: This is Dr. Gordon Smith. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Meg Kay-Stacey about her article on hypersomnia, which appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on the neurology of sleep. Meg, welcome to the podcast, and maybe you can begin by just introducing yourself to our audience. Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. Hi, I'm so glad to be here. So, like you said, I'm Meg Kay-Stacey. I'm a sleep neurologist at the University of Chicago. I'm also the AAN's Sleep Section vice chair. Dr Smith: Awesome. I didn't quite know what to expect in reading your article, except it was gonna be about people who are really sleepy. I was really amazed at how common these problems are, even, we'll get into this, disorders that I think of as being super rare. So, I know our listeners are gonna really enjoy hearing from you. I wonder if you could begin by just defining hypersomnia and maybe give us a flavor for the impact this has on patients who have primary disorders of hypersomnia. Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. I mean, so hypersomnia is really an excessive daytime sleepiness, so a feeling of excessive sleepiness, feeling like they can't stay awake during the day. And these patients' quality of life is quite impacted by these symptoms, and there's lots of different conditions that can cause it, but it can be quite detrimental to day-to-day living. Dr Smith: I honestly am sleepy a lot cause I work too hard or stay up late, and sleepiness seems to be a very common symptom. How do you sort out when a patient's excessive daytime sleepiness is pathologic related to lifestyle and the extent to which it may be a sleep apnea versus one of the other disorders that we'll talk about? Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. I mean, you really have to take a good history. So as neurologists, we know that, that we have to do that, but particularly a sleep history and really understand, first and foremost, how much sleep the patient is getting. Really important to understand, are they getting adequate sleep at night, right? Because chronic insufficient sleep can cause daytime sleepiness, right? And can make people appear like they might have a primary hypersomnia disorder when in fact they don't. So that's sort of first and foremost, and then it's assessing the other symptoms that they have. So, it's assessing nocturnal symptoms. You mentioned sleep apnea, so assessing for things like snoring and witnessed apneas, nocturia, and then assessing for what the quality of their sleep like. Is it refreshing? Is it not refreshing? How easy or hard is it to wake up in the morning? And then asking them again about daytime symptoms. Are you falling asleep inappropriately at work? Are, you know, you falling asleep while driving? Are you finding it hard to stay awake even after you've had a full night of sleep? To really try to differentiate what the symptoms might be from. And then it's also assessing things, sleep apnea, for example, physical exam findings. You know, are they obese? Do they have a larger neck circumference? Is the airway more crowded? And then we do have some measures, some scales, so there's the Epworth Sleepiness Scale that we'll use that assesses sleepiness, which is kind of a good way to at least initially assess how sleepy a patient might be during the day. Dr Smith: So that's great, and we'll talk a bit about sleep apnea, I hope. But when I hear hypersomnia, I always think about narcolepsy, and I wonder if maybe we can begin there. Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. Dr Smith: I was super interested to learn how common this is. About as common as myasthenia gravis. Actually, the population prevalence number is exactly the same as myasthenia. My Monday morning clinic is mostly myasthenia. So how do we recognize narcolepsy? Cause I'm worrying that I'm missing it. Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. So, narcolepsy, you know, there's two types. There's narcolepsy type 1 and narcolepsy type 2. So, narcolepsy type 1 is a little easier because you have cataplexy. But with both conditions, you're gonna see excessive daytime sleepiness. You're gonna ask about things like sleep paralysis, whether or not they're having sleep-related hallucinations, so hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. Are they having other sort of REM, intrusion phenomenon? You may also hear things like REM behavior disorder, so acting out their dreams at night, and then some degree of, you know, difficulty waking up in the morning, feeling like they need to nap. Naps are often more refreshing in patients with narcolepsy which is a feature that when we talk about idiopathic hypersomnia kind of helps to differentiate them. So, it's really just asking about sleepiness and assessing for these other symptoms that they can have associated with narcolepsy. Dr Smith: I was also interested to learn that narcolepsy is the most common cause of REM sleep behavior disorder in young patients, which is pretty cool. But I wonder, you used a term that I've never heard of, and I'm betting some of our listeners haven't, which is REM intrusion phenomenon. Could you tell us more about that? Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. So, this is the idea that in narcolepsy, your sleep states are sort of, jumbled up, would be the way of thinking of it. You have these phenomenon where REM will persist into wakefulness. So, sleep paralysis is actually a perfect example of that, right? That you wake up and you feel like you're awake, but your body is still paralyzed, you can't move. Cataplexy is similarly a REM intrusion phenomenon, as are these hallucinations that I mentioned, the sleep-related hallucinations. Dr Smith: So what pearls do you have for recognizing cataplexy? What's the spectrum of cataplexy? Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. So, I think cataplexy, it's associated with emotion, right? And we most commonly think about it being associated with laughter, right, with positive emotion, but it's key to remember that it can happen with negative emotion too, with fright, being upset or angry. And usually when you're asking patients about it, you wanna phrase it to understand, are they having episodes where they feel like they have brief loss of muscle tone? And it can be subtle. It can be a head drop, their mouth opening, a hand dropping something, and it's brief. Usually it's seconds to just a couple of minutes. These aren't prolonged episodes, and they're not losing consciousness. They're awake, they're just having that brief loss of muscle tone. Dr Smith: So, what about orexin? I'm particularly interested in how often it's necessary to do an LP and look for CSF orexin levels. Is that a common thing in your practice, or do you rely on clinical phenomenology in a, you know, polysomnogram with multiple sleep latency testing to confirm a diagnosis of narcolepsy? Dr Kay-Stacey: Most commonly, you're gonna still do the PSG and the MSLT, obviously, because it's less invasive than doing the lumbar puncture. There are scenarios, right, where you may consider doing the LP. I think if someone has cataplexy and you're pretty confident in that and they have a positive PSG, MSLT testing done, you know, you really don't need the lumbar puncture, right? But if you're in that gray area that for whatever reason you have a really high suspicion they have narcolepsy, but for whatever reason the PSG, MSLT either couldn't be done or it was inconclusive, then I might think about doing the lumbar puncture. The other scenario is that there are some patients who have to be on REM-suppressing medications, like antidepressants, for example. In those patients, it can confound the results. And so, if you're not able to stop those for the MSLT testing, then that would be a scenario where I might use the lumbar puncture. Insurance is another reason that, again, if you have some of that inconclusive findings on the PSG, MSLT, that doing the lumbar puncture then can help to confirm the diagnosis, but only useful for type 1 narcolepsy, not type 2. Dr Smith: And type 2 is like type 1 but without cataplexy? Dr Kay-Stacey: Exactly. And then you kind of can think of it as sort of on a spectrum, I would say. There's sort of narcolepsy type 1, and there's idiopathic hypersomnia, and narcolepsy type 2 kind of falls in between. Dr Smith: Do you require the other core features of narcolepsy to make a diagnosis of type 2, like sleep paralysis, hallucinations? Dr Kay-Stacey: Right. You do. You don't necessarily have to have all of them, but you will see similar features, though most of them are more common in, in type 1 than in type 2. Dr Smith: So, I'm understanding you need to see, REM intrusion phenomena. Dr Kay-Stacey: Mm-hmm. Yes. Dr Smith: I love saying that. Makes me sound like I'm part of the sleep team. Now we're all part of the sleep team, aren't we? Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. Dr Smith: What about idiopathic hypersomnia? In reading about it and thinking about it, it sounds a lot like narcolepsy without those other features, but there, there are some differences. I wonder if you could give our listeners pearls into how to recognize that as opposed to maybe type 2 narcolepsy. Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. So idiopathic hypersomnia patients are also very sleepy during the day. They're more commonly going to describe that they sleep through the night, often for long hours, and that they wake up and still feel very unrefreshed. They'll have what we call, morning sleep inertia, or some people call it, you know, sleep drunkenness, where when they wake up in the morning, they feel like they're in a haze or a fog. It's really hard to get out of bed. They're often setting multiple alarms. And this is after having a full night of sleep, ten, twelve hours of sleep, and then they just feel tired and sleepy all day. If they nap, their naps will often feel unrefreshing, and when they take naps, they're often longer naps, and then they wake up and again will maybe feel some of that sleep drunkenness or inertia, and it makes it difficult for them to wake up. And then they don't have as many of the REM intrusion phenomena, but you still can sometimes hear things like sleep paralysis or the hallucinations in patients with idiopathic hypersomnia. And so that's where it does get tricky when you're trying to differentiate from narcolepsy. Really, the difference with narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia when you do testing has to do with what you see on the overnight sleep study on the polysomnogram followed by that multiple sleep latency test. In the case of all three conditions, the MSLT should show a mean sleep latency of eight minutes or less. What separates narcolepsy from idiopathic hypersomnia is that in narcolepsy, the expectation's you'll have two or more sleep onset REM periods, so you go into REM sleep very quickly. Whereas in idiopathic hypersomnia, you'll have one sleep onset REM period or less. Traditionally, you'd think of that you wouldn't have any, but you theoretically could have one on that. So, that's sort of one way that we can differentiate the two. Dr Smith: That's really helpful, actually. Thank you. What about treatment? There are a whole bunch of different medications that you talk about in your article, including, medications that are in the pipeline, which is exciting. What's the treatment approach, maybe starting with narcolepsy? Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. So, with narcolepsy, there are more FDA-approved medications and options then there are for idiopathic hypersomnia, which is, you know, one of the things I hope will change over time with things that are in the pipeline. But with narcolepsy, traditionally often start first with an alerting agent such as modafinil or armodafinil to really help with those daytime symptoms. And then there are a number of other medications that can be used. Sometimes if the armodafinil, modafinil don't work, we'll advance into stimulant medications that are amphetamine containing. At night, there's a medication called sodium oxybate that you can take for narcolepsy. The low sodium oxybate is actually also approved for idiopathic hypersomnia. But sodium oxybate, the idea is that you're taking it at night, and it's helping to reduce the disrupted sleep that occurs in patients with narcolepsy, really kind of enhances slow-wave sleep at night and makes the sleep that patients are getting better quality, which then improves both excessive daytime sleepiness during the day as well as the cataplexy. And then there are some other medications, solrimfetol and pitolisant, that are also used in narcolepsy. I don't wanna necessarily get into the nitty-gritty of all of the mechanisms of action, but definitely read the article to learn more about that. Dr Smith: So that's really helpful. What about cataplexy? Do these medicines also help with cataplexy, or is there a different approach for that symptom? Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. So, sodium oxybate definitely can be used, and the low-dose sodium oxybate can be used to help with the cataplexy. But then we'll also sometimes use medications in the antidepressant category as well. So, SSRIs, SNRIs, and tricyclic antidepressants can all also be used to help in the treatment of cataplexy. Dr Smith: And how about idiopathic hypersomnia? Dr Kay-Stacey: Yeah. So, for idiopathic hypersomnia, there a…

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Insomnia With Dr. Brandon R. Peters-Mathews Sep 02, 2026

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Insomnia affects neurologic health, quality of life, and daily functioning, but effective treatments are available. In this episode, Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews discusses a practical approach to evaluating chronic insomnia, highlights the importance of identifying contributing conditions such as sleep apnea and mood disorders, and reviews cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), the recommended first-line treatment. Learn how addressing sleep can improve outcomes across a wide range of neurologic disorders. In this episode, Katie Grouse, MD, FAAN, speaks with Brandon R. Peters-Mathews, MD, FAAN, FAASM, author of the article "Insomnia" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Grouse is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a clinical assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco in San Francisco, California. Dr. Peters-Mathews is the Section Head of Sleep Medicine at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle, Washington. Additional Resources Read the article: Insomnia Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @BrandonPetersMD Full episode transcript available here Dr Grouse: Insomnia may be one of the most common medical issues experienced by patients, yet our knowledge about how to manage it remains limited. Today, I have the opportunity to speak with one of the world's leading experts on sleep disorders, Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews, about the latest issue of Continuum on Neurology of Sleep. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Grouse: This is Dr. Katie Grouse. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews about his article on insomnia. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on Neurology of Sleep. Welcome to the podcast, and please introduce yourself to our audience. Dr Peters-Mathews: It's my pleasure to join you, and I'm happy to talk about this article. I think it's an interesting one for most folks. I am a board-certified sleep neurologist. I practice at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle. I did my neurology training back at the University of Minnesota and my sleep training at Stanford University. I've been in practice for more than thirteen years at this point. It's hard to believe, but it's exciting to be able to speak with you today. Dr Grouse: This is definitely an important topic for everybody. Certainly, sleep and the lack of it affects all of our patients, and I can't imagine there's a single clinical neurologist who doesn't have to answer questions and help evaluate patients with this problem, so very high-yield topic for everyone. Now, having read your article, I'm curious if you had to choose one key point that you want the readers of your article to take away after reading it, what would it be? Dr Peters-Mathews: Emphasize for my patients that insomnia is a condition that we can work through and resolve, that if we really can understand the underlying contributing causes and resolve those issues, we can typically improve sleep. It's a process. It takes time. It takes some attention and, and sometimes even testing to figure out what's going on. But if we can dial into these root causes, we can typically help somebody to sleep much better. As part of that, we often employ a therapy called CBT-I, which we'll talk about here a little bit later. But that also helps us to identify some of these contributing factors that are leading to the poor sleep. Dr Grouse: And I definitely want to talk more about CBT, it's such an important topic. But even before we get into that, I'd love it if you could just walk us through a hypothetical case of a patient with insomnia. I think the type of patient that I think we've all seen in our clinical practice and somebody who says, "You know, I've had poor sleep. I've had insomnia for many years. I've tried all of the things you're supposed to try. You know, I've tried sleep hygiene. I've tried this. I've tried that. I've tried medications. Nothing seems to work." Could you walk us through how you would evaluate a patient like this and start to consider what to recommend? Dr Peters-Mathews: So, some simple information that we can gather, would be information about when they're trying to go to bed, how long it's taking them to fall asleep initially. If they wake in the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, how often they wake in the night. If they're experiencing early morning awakenings, their final wake time, and when they actually get out of bed in the morning. That gives me a sense of the structure of their sleep pattern and whether or not they might be spending an excessive amount of time in bed for their own sleep need at their current age. The other factors that we might consider are sleep disorders, and typically, I would assess for other symptoms that would point me towards sleep apnea or restless legs and occasionally other disorders of sleep. We wanna make sure we're not missing comorbid conditions that might be affecting that person. These often include mood disorders. Sleep and mood walk hand in hand, and so anxiety and depression are important to identify and treat if present. We also want to make sure someone's not suffering from chronic pain or other conditions that might be impacting their sleep. So, I take a broad approach. I ask the same questions to each patient that comes to see me. I wanna make sure I'm not missing some of these details. And then some of these folks will require testing to further understand their sleep. Others may move on to a different therapy, and long-term may require even other interventions, including medications, to fully resolve their condition. Dr Grouse: You mentioned in your article circadian rhythm sleep disorders. How often are these really a factor in patients with chronic insomnia? And do you think that's something that we as kind of first-line clinicians should be screening for as well? Dr Peters-Mathews: So delayed sleep phase syndrome is the most common circadian disorder, and these are folks who are night owls by nature. They often develop their sleep patterns, as teenagers, if not before, and they may fade away in the working years but come back in retirement age. I would say that's a very common condition. It may affect as many as one in ten people. The other circadian disorders are pretty uncommon, so advanced sleep phase syndrome, where somebody is sleepy early and waking too early, that may only affect one in three hundred people. There are other conditions that affect specific populations, like non-twenty-four circadian pattern affects blind people. Typically, half of blind people have that condition. There are conditions that affect the regularity of sleep, so an irregular sleep-wake pattern that might occur more in folks with maybe an advanced dementia. So, there are populations where these conditions can be fairly common, but among the general population, that night owl tendency is by far the most common. Dr Grouse: That's really helpful. And just taking a step back, why is insomnia bad for us? So, we worry about this in our patients. We know it can make neurologic issues worse. But in general, like, what are the reasons that having poor sleep can affect our health? Dr Peters-Mathews: Yeah, and it's not enough hours, certainly quantity, but also quality of sleep that matters. And I tell people that sleep is a pillar of health, just like nutrition and exercise. It's the other main contributor to our health and well-being. And so, it has its fingers in almost every aspect of our health. Insomnia on its own is a risk factor for other psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, even disorders like bipolar and schizophrenia. Folks with insomnia are more likely to have alcohol or drug abuse issues and are at higher risk for things like chronic pain, suicide and, and social and occupational dysfunction. So, it's a disorder that has a really profound effect on how someone functions during the day, and again, may take a toll on their health over time. Dr Grouse: That makes sense, and I would assume that there are certain populations within our neurology practices where we should really be attuned to the risk of insomnia. Are there specific populations you'd recommend really make it a habit of screening for insomnia? Dr Peters-Mathews: I was joking with someone recently that anyone with a neurological nervous system can have issues, impacted by poor sleep. There are certain groups, so chronic headache patients are perhaps one that might warrant a further evaluation and management. Folks with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's may have physical conditions that lead to more discomfort in sleep, fewer movements of their body in sleep, issues around nocturia that would disturb their sleep. Certainly, those with dementia, Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia overlap a lot, as does multiple system atrophy. That can point us towards other conditions like REM sleep behavior disorder, but also insomnia can be an important feature of those disorders as well. And then folks with stroke often have disturbance to their sleep and may develop insomnia after experiencing a stroke. So those are specific populations where I think the yield is high to be looking for insomnia and other sleep disorders. Dr Grouse: Yeah, that makes sense. I think a lot of us think of insomnia as almost like, make sure we're not missing this as sort of a mimic of the problem, when in fact it's probably just more part and parcel of the problem and something we need to be thinking about treating as part of their disorder. So helpful to think about it in that light, at least in my own mind. Now, I want to get a little bit back to some of the therapies you've recommended, and I think first just stopping again at sleep hygiene. Your article has a really great list, I think, of sort of like a checklist of actions that people should be taking to make sure that they are managing their sleep hygiene well. And I definitely recommend our listeners look to that. How often do you think that focusing on sleep hygiene helps when you get a patient who says, "Hey, I have got terrible sleep. You know, what do I do?" Dr Peters-Mathews: It's pretty common for people to have access to this information through their own reading online, and most folks have worked through this by the time they've come to see me, and often a primary care provider or specialist may have given some of this guidance as well. It's pretty rare for them to not recognize something as obvious as having caffeine too late in the day by the time they're coming to my attention. The sleep hygiene generally is used as a control when we do research to look at how something like medication is working or CBT-I might be working. It's the comparative control. It's almost like the null intervention. So, it's not highly effective, and if folks are not finding it helpful, they've made those adjustments to their sleep environment or their habits, and they're continuing to have issues, there's typically more that needs to be done, and that's where CBT-I really comes in as a strong intervention for those people. Dr Grouse: And then getting on the topic of CBT-I, so helpful. I'm really glad that your article spent a lot of time talking about it as really a truly high-yield, great intervention for insomnia. And I really felt that the question shouldn't be: When is cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia helpful? But like, when isn't it helpful? What are your thoughts about that? Dr Peters-Mathews: Yeah. I always point out that the American College of Physicians has recommended CBT-I for adult patients as the initial treatment for chronic insomnia even before the use of a medication for nearly ten years. That recommendation came out in July of 2016. So, there are folks who may not be good candidates for it, who may be screened out because of other conditions that they have, and there certainly are folks who don't do as well with CBT-I. And adherence is important. Somebody needs to be able to follow the instructions and apply that to their lives. And certainly, there are a number of things that could interfere with that compliance. I would say untreated anxiety and pain are two things that often trip people up. It's like running a race with a broken leg. Despite their best efforts, if those are not addressed, they will continue to have issues around insomnia. And then one thing that often is unrecognized and may be missed is untreated sleep apnea. That is a common contributor to a chronic insomnia, especially in older folks, women beyond the age of menopause and men even starting in middle age, thirties and forties. We don't want to miss sleep apnea. Even insomnia that's, "I can't fall asleep at the beginning of night," that could still be sleep apnea, so that's something I really emphasize with my patients. Dr Grouse: Really great reminder about sleep apnea for sure. Something that always is beneficial to make sure we are not missing. Oftentimes I'll bring up a CBT for insomnia, and what is that? Like, what would we actually do, and what is a high-level overview of what happens with CBT-I? Dr Peters-Mathews: Yeah. So, I generally tell my patients that this is a six-week program. It's a structured program, almost like a boot camp for sleep, in which we are addressing underlying causes, recognizing what those are and, and working through those underlying causes. There is often tracking using a sleep log or sometimes wearable data.To guide decisions that are made in the program. It's very goal-directed, science-based therapy. We often introduce concepts around sleep drive, circadian rhythm dealing with a busy mind at night. There's concepts of mindfulness and relaxation training that are introduced. People often are able to taper or stop using sleeping pills as part of this therapy. And the nice thing is they walk away with a set of skills that they can apply the rest of their lives to sleep more normally. And so, there's good research that suggests even years after someone's completed a CBT-I course, they continue to sleep more normally. They have the tools that they need to sleep better even years beyond that education. Dr Grouse: You know, this just sounds so great. It almost sounds like why wouldn't someone benefit from this? But of course, like I would imagine many institutions experience, I've definitely run into difficulties with access for my patients for CBT-I, and we have long wait lists. And I imagine there's many places where there just aren't even any specialists that patients can get to, to help with this. What are the resources that our listeners can take advantage of for their patients to get access to these types of therapies? Dr Peters-Mathews: So, one thing I tried to really emphasize in the article is that there are resources that can be drawn in. I'll give you some examples. So, at our institution, we have three sleep specialists, full-time sleep specialists, who trained at Stanford to become…

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Central Sleep Apnea With Dr. Ran R. Liu Aug 26, 2026

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Central sleep apnea is a complex and often underrecognized sleep-related breathing disorder that differs from obstructive sleep apnea by involving reduced respiratory drive rather than upper airway obstruction. In this episode, Dr. Ran Liu reviews the underlying mechanisms of central sleep apnea, including the role of ventilatory control instability, discusses its association with neurologic conditions such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, ALS, and myasthenic disorders, and highlights key considerations for diagnosis and management. Learn how emerging technologies, personalized treatment strategies, and advances in sleep medicine are improving outcomes for patients with this heterogeneous group of disorders. In this episode, Teshamae Monteith, MD, FAAN, speaks with Ran R. Liu, MD, FRCPC, MSc, author of the article "Central Sleep Apnea" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Monteith is the associate editor of Continuum® Audio and an associate professor of clinical neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Miami, Florida. Dr. Liu is an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. Additional Resources Read the article: Central Sleep Apnea Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @headacheMD Guest: @SleepyNeuroDoc Full episode transcript available here Dr Monteith: You may be familiar with obstructive sleep apnea, but central sleep apnea is often less understood and frequently underdiagnosed. In this podcast, we break down the key clinical pearls to sharpen your diagnostic reasoning, discuss why central sleep apnea matters, and to explore some of the fascinating advances transforming the field. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, editor-in-chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Monteith: This is Dr. Teshamae Monteith. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Richard Liu about his article on central sleep apnea. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on Neurology of Sleep. Welcome to our podcast. How are you? Dr Liu: Good. Thank you, Dr. Monteith, for having me today. Dr Monteith: Please introduce yourself to our audience. Dr Liu: Hello, everybody. My name is Richard Liu. I am a sleep neurologist. I am working out of Toronto at both Sunnybrook Health Science Center and MedSleep. I did my residency at Queen's for neurology and my sleep medicine fellowship at Harvard University. Dr Monteith: Great. And what got you interested in sleep? Dr Liu: Thank you very much for asking. For me, sleep medicine is a field where essentially everything is connected. Certainly, impaired sleep can affect many other conditions, including many neurological conditions. And even within sleep medicine, when somebody has a sleep disorder, often the entire system is connected. So as an example, if you have insomnia and fragmented sleep and periodic limb movements of sleep, certainly these conditions can impact sleep apnea. And certainly, for today's topic of central sleep apnea, this is an extremely complicated disorder where it's a very in-depth integration between neurological and respiratory physiology, among other systems as well. Dr Monteith: So, I guess you're kind of like the cornerstone, sleep being the cornerstone of neurology. Everyone has to sleep. That's for sure. Great. So why don't we talk about what central sleep apnea is, and how prevalent is it as a collective group of disorders compared to obstructive sleep apnea? Dr Liu: So, one way to think about central sleep apnea is that this is a heterogeneous group of etiology. But the primary concept here for central sleep apnea is that there's a reduction in respiratory drive. This is in contrast to obstructive sleep apnea, where essentially this is some form of airway obstruction in the presence of relatively intact respiratory drive. And of course, there's mixed apneas where they may contain features of both. But of course, now we know that even obstructive sleep apnea, there's a certain degree of drive dependence somewhat blurring these distinctions. The overall prevalence of central sleep apnea is about five to ten percent of all patients with sleep- disorder breathing. And certainly, it could be higher in some neurological conditions, such as things like stroke, multiple sclerosis, and multisystem atrophy. Dr Monteith: Great. So certainly, it's out there. Why don't you tell us about the objectives of your article? Dr Liu: Absolutely. Thank you for asking. I think the main objective of this article is really to highlight that central sleep apnea is a complex syndrome resulting from a large group of heterogeneous etiologies. And of course, again, it could be associated with many neurological conditions. And really here, I want to highlight advancements, both medicine and technology, on both the side of diagnosis of central sleep apnea, as well as the multimodal targeted treatment. Dr Monteith: And what do you want our listeners to take away from this talk and certainly your article? What are the key essential points? Dr Liu: Thank you very much for asking. I think that one way of looking at central sleep apnea to etiologically divide this into both hypocapnic and hypercapnic central sleep apnea. And of course, loop gain being a major driver for a hypocapnic central sleep apnea, and that one can actually think about hypocapnic central sleep apnea beyond a phenotypic spectrum with obstructive sleep apnea, with many patients having overlapping features of both obstruction and central component. On the other hand, hypercapnic central sleep apnea, often also known as hyperventilation syndrome, can span etiology from chemoreflex dysfunction to a broad range of neuroanatomical localization, such as central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, neuromuscular junction, and muscle disorders. Dr Monteith: And what are some of the symptoms of central sleep apnea? Do any of them differ from obstructive sleep apnea? Dr Liu: Thank you for asking, that's an excellent question. So certainly, central sleep apnea symptoms can overlap with obstructive sleep apnea symptoms. And of course, given the large range of underlying etiology, often the CSA symptoms depend on the underlying etiology. There may be less snoring compared to obstructive sleep apnea patients, especially the hypocapnic CSA patients. Of course, these patients, like OSA, may have frequent awakenings, gasping and choking their sleep, and nocturia, and so on.These patients may have daytime sleepiness, insomnia-like symptoms, or they could be asymptomatic. Interestingly, the hypocarbnic central sleep apnea patients, they're a bit more prone to have the insomnia-like symptoms, whereas the hypercarbnic central sleep apnea patients, they tend to have a bit more of the daytime sleepiness and morning headaches. Dr Monteith: You spoke about some of the neurological disorders that might be associated with central sleep apnea, like stroke and multiple sclerosis. What about some of the more traditional risk factors associated with obstructive sleep apnea or conditions associated with it, like obesity and hypertension? Or does that just mix the picture? Dr Liu: There is many overlap between risk factors between obstructive sleep apnea and central sleep apnea, and certainly one of the things that I highlight in this article is really that often it's not just black and white, that this could be a spectrum with overlapping disease between both conditions. So certainly, in our neurological world, stroke is the most common thing that may be associated with central sleep apnea. But overall, cardiovascular issues such as heart failure, atrial fibrillation, these things can also be associated with central sleep apnea. And again, from the neurological perspective, if we were to divide from hypocarbnic versus hypercarbnic central sleep apnea, by thinking about the hypercarbic central sleep apnea, again, this is where we're thinking about hypoventilation syndromes. You know, anything that can cause neuromuscular weakness, this is something that we should have a high alarm for, that potentially there may be a hypoventilation component. So, things like any myasthenic syndromes and ALS. Dr Monteith: Great. Why don't we also talk about the classification? When was the last time central sleep apnea's classification was updated, and what should we know about the classification? Dr Liu: The most recent classification for central sleep apnea is written in the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, third edition. In this edition, it's classified with six central sleep apnea syndromes. So, these are the CSA with Cheyne-Stoke breathing, CSA due to high altitude periodic breathing, primary CSA, CSA due to medication or substance, CSA due to medical disorder without Cheyne-Stoke breathing, and treatment-emergent central sleep apnea. These classifications more so describe the circumstance of when CSA occurs. A more etiological classification that we can consider would be classifying them by the underlying pathophysiology, which is dividing this from hypercarbnic central sleep apnea versus a hypocarbnic central sleep apnea. Certainly, both set of classification are discussed in this article. Dr Monteith: Yeah. You discussed at length, the major physiological factors that our audience is just going to have to read. I don't want them to hear this too much while they're driving or on the treadmill, cause its super high level. But why don't we just start with some very basic factors that we need to know about this circuitry? Dr Liu: Perhaps I can start with this concept of loop gain, which is the most important concept under hypocarbnic central sleep apnea. For any one of my colleagues who's listening to this, they're probably laughing right now cause they think that loop gain is my favorite word. So, loop gain is an engineering term referring to the sensitivity of a feedback loop. So, in the context of sleep medicine, this is an overly sensitive respiratory control to carbon dioxide and oxygen fluctuation. There are three components. The main one is controller gain. This is a chemosensitivity predominant to CO2. The second is plant gain, which is the lung's effectiveness for carbon dioxide excretion. And the last is what's called the mixing gain. This is circuitry delay from the time the signal travels from the pulmonary artery to the peripheral and central chemoreceptors. So conceptually, one may think, let's say something decreases your ventilation, so for example, apnea or hypopnea. With this, as you can imagine, when you stop breathing, your CO2 builds up, and this builds up according to the curve of the plant gain. And of course, this build of CO2 signal takes time to go from your lung to your chemoreceptor. That's your mixing gain. And of course, here it meets the overly sensitive chemoreceptors. This is your controller gain. As a result, this results in amplification of your ventilation to the initial respiratory disturbance. So, you have a overshoot of ventilation. All of a sudden, you're blowing out too much carbon dioxide, then you become hypocarbnic. At one point, if you blow out way too much carbon dioxide, your CO2 goes below what's called a PCO2 apneic threshold. After this, if your CO2's below, you essentially stop breathing. And of course, after that, you can imagine your CO2s are building up again. So, when this loop goes over and over, you generate what's called a chemoreflex-driven respiratory oscillation, where you create a crescendo, decrescendo-like flow pattern, which is underneath what we see in periodic breathing in central sleep apnea. Dr Monteith: So, without going into too much detail, what is the key way to target restoration of equilibrium? Are there anatomical targets, physiologic targets that we're trying to manipulate here? Dr Liu: Again, thank you very much for that wonderful question. There's certainly many approaches that we could do to improve the stability of the system. Certainly, there are treatments for ventilation, either CPAP or in the case of hypocarbon central sleep apnea, things like adaptive servo ventilation. There is also medications that we can certainly discuss later that can double down the entire system for loop gain. Positional therapy can help for many of these patients. For the appropriate patient, improving their arousal threshold can actually reduce arousal-induced amplification of loop gain. Many of these patients, again, if appropriate, certainly weight loss may be helpful, and these are among many things that we can potentially do to improve the ventilatory stability of these patients. Dr Monteith: Okay, great. But let's also talk about the general overall approach to diagnosing, and much of it is by history, as you mentioned. There's also sometimes a need, as you say, to differentiate out how much is obstructive. So, what is the thinking process there when you're approaching a patient? Dr Liu: So perhaps I can start with in terms of the diagnostic modalities that we could use for this. So, the gold standard for diagnosis of central sleep apnea is still our polysonogram. The home sleep apnea test sometimes may be harder to distinguish between obstructive and central events. In addition, on a PSG, you have EEG. This allows you to assess for sleep quality and arousals, as well as the EMGs, which can help you pick up periodic limb movements of sleep. And of course, all of these things themselves can affect the central sleep apnea and can be a potential treatment factor. Dr Monteith: Before we get into treatment, can you just give us, like, the top five or six drugs or drug classes we need to look for so that, you know, we can discontinue or try something else for our patients that might be complicating their presentation? Dr Liu: Certainly medications, in some cases, can help central sleep apnea, but other cases can certainly be a precipitant of central sleep apnea. So, one thing to consider would be opioid medication. They can certainly cause very complicated central sleep apnea, something called ataxic breathing, where you have irregularity to the tidal volume and the rate of breathing. Other medications such as Oxybate, baclofen, valproic acid, gabapentin, all of which can certainly contribute to central sleep apnea. And of course, in the stroke world, something that we should always think about is that Tetagelor can also contribute to central sleep apnea. And outside of this, things like muscle relaxants, anesthetic agents can also be a contributor. Dr Monteith: Great. Now let's get into some of the treatment. Dr Liu: I like to divide treatment into targeting a hypercarbnic central sleep apnea and a hypocarbonic central sleep apnea. For hypocarbonic central sleep apnea, the first line is CPAP treatment. But for many patients, CPAP therapy is insufficient. There's also adaptive servo ventilation, which is an advanced device designed for hypocarbonic central sleep apnea. For hypercarbic central sleep apnea, again, first line is CPAP treatment, with more advanced devices being a bilevel therapy as well as volume-assured pressure support ventilation. There are also medications that can reduce loop gain, with the most research…

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Sleep Diagnostics and Monitoring Technology in Obstructive Sleep Apnea With Dr. Joyce K. Lee-Iannotti Aug 19, 2026

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Advances in sleep technology are transforming how neurologists identify and manage obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that affects up to 70% of patients with certain neurologic disorders and can negatively impact cognitive and neurologic outcomes if left untreated. In this episode, Dr. Joyce Lee-Iannotti discusses the growing role of wearable and nearable sleep-monitoring devices, when home sleep studies are appropriate, and how emerging technologies are expanding access to diagnosis and treatment. Learn practical strategies for screening patients, interpreting sleep data, and partnering with sleep specialists to improve long-term neurologic health through better sleep. In this episode, Casey S. Albin, MD, FAAN, speaks with Joyce K. Lee-Iannotti, MD, FAAN, FAASM, author of the article "Sleep Diagnostics and Monitoring Technology in Obstructive Sleep Apnea" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Albin is a Continuum® Audio interviewer, associate editor of media engagement, and an assistant professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Lee-Iannotti is a Professor of Neurology at the Barrow Neurological Institute, University of Arizona College of Medicine, and Creighton School of Medicine in Phoenix, Arizona. Additional Resources Read the article: Sleep Diagnostics and Monitoring Technology in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @caseyalbin Guest: @jleeiannotti Full episode transcript available here Dr Albin: Through the neurology of sleep issue, I think we have all been convinced that we all need better sleep, both for ourselves and for our patients. And fortunately, there is an abundance of new technology that can enable us to diagnose sleep problems, and then also make sure that our patients are getting the rest that's going to give them the best chance at a good cognitive recovery, and improve their cognitive function even if they are not currently suffering from a neurologic condition. Today, I am so excited to dive deeper into this topic. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Albin: Hello, this is Dr. Casey Albin. Today I'm interviewing Dr. Joyce Lee-Iannotti about her article on sleep diagnostics and monitoring technology in obstructive sleep apnea. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on neurology of sleep. Welcome to the podcast, I'd love to just start by having you introduce yourself to our audience. Dr Lee-Iannotti: Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Albin. I'm Joyce Lee-Iannotti. I'm a professor of neurology at Barrow Neurological Institute. I am boarded in general neurology, stroke, and sleep, but I spend most of my time in the sleep world, so I jokingly say that I get more sleep doing sleep than I certainly did in stroke. Dr Albin: Absolutely. I mean, wow, what a fascinating career, and I suspect that we're actually gonna get to some of how all of those pathophysiologies might overlap in the world of sleep. But you had the really exciting task of trying to distill this exciting, rapidly evolving field of sleep diagnostics, and I suspect it's relevant to many of the patients who end up in the neurology clinic, and I suspect that it's actually pretty relevant to many of our listeners who themselves might actually be wearing sleep tracking devices. And all of us probably wonder, well, how can we use that data to improve our own cognitive function and certainly make our patient's life even better? Before we even get into some of the meat and potatoes of this, I thought it would be really helpful for us to define some terms that come up in your article, one of which is wearables. We might figure that out, but the other is nearable. Walk us through what's a wearable, what's a nearable, how are they different? Dr Lee-Iannotti: I'm happy to do that. First of all, the article is entitled Sleep Diagnostics and Monitoring Technology, and this was a super fun article for me to write because it's very practical, and it's generalizable to everybody. So, I'm going to start with a wearable, and a wearable is really a device that is simply worn on the body. And we're all familiar with wearables like smart watches, they're rings, they're patches, they're headbands, and the most validated form of a wearable that you've probably heard about is actigraphy, which we use in the sleep clinic. Dr Albin: Tell us a little bit more. So, what is actigraphy? I've heard the word before, but don't actually know what it means. Dr Lee-Iannotti: Actigraphy has been a tool that we've used in the sleep clinic for a really long time. Traditionally, we used it to monitor circadian rhythm patterns in people who are night owls or morning larks. And then more currently, we actually use it to track sleep patterns in people with suspected narcolepsy. So, before they come in for a sleep study, we actually have them wear an actigraphy for about a week just to get a sense of their sleep duration and their circadian pattern. Dr Albin: Got it. And what is it monitoring? Our movement or the patterns that we may or may not make? Dr Lee-Iannotti: It's really based on movement. You're exactly right. Dr Albin: Cool. Okay, so most of this is based on gold standard monitoring with actigraphy. What other things can be incorporated into these wearable devices? Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah, the technology is really advanced, and every day it changes, which is super exciting. So, on top of movement, these wearables can look at temperature. They can look at even EEG, like limited EEG, heart rate variability, and a really big word that we like to use in sleep technology, which is PPG, or photoplethysmography data, and that's really looking at heart rate variability and oxygenation, saturations, and following those levels as well. Dr Albin: Wow, so you basically can get most of the data that you might have historically needed to go to a sleep lab to get. Dr Lee-Iannotti: Most of them. They're still a surrogate. You'll hear me emphasize in the article as well that the gold standard remains the in-lab polysomnogram, but these are good surrogate markers that patients can wear long term to look at trends and patterns. Dr Albin: Absolutely. And we're gonna unpack a little bit about who specifically those are best for and, really what it gives you in the clinic. But before we jump into that, what's a nearable, and how is that different? Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah. Nearables are really exciting too. So, these are devices that monitor sleep but don't require direct contact on the body. So, these are devices that our patients will use, but it'll be at the bedside table. They're devices that actually go underneath the mattress, or they can be in, like, the ambient environment to detect sleep patterns. Dr Albin: Oh my gosh. How is it doing that if it's not actually something you're wearing? Dr Lee-Iannotti: I know. It seems a little Big Brother-ish, doesn't it? Dr Albin: Yes. Dr Lee-Iannotti: So, they use a technology called radio frequency signals, sometimes radar, sometimes sonar, pressure sensors, even microphones, and they're picking up things like respiration, movement, snoring, and that's how they can decipher sleep patterns. Dr Albin: Crazy. I mean, I guess the benefit of that is that it's less disruptive to the user 'cause it's not actually on them and having contact with them, and I suspect there's probably some downsides in terms of just it's a more limited data set you're getting. Dr Lee-Iannotti: Absolutely. Yeah, you're exactly right. It's more convenient because it's not touching them, so, in theory, they're gonna sleep more comfortably. But I would like to think that the most validated forms of devices that we use to track sleep have to have some form of contact with the body, and this technology is new and probably needs a few layers of more sophistication to be as accurate as the wearables. Dr Albin: Absolutely. I feel like we're going to have this conversation in five, maybe even less than that, years, and this data will have become like, oh, we all have something in our room that's monitoring everything. The world is crazy. All right. One of the places where your article really stood out to me is that sleep diagnostics have really taken off, particularly when we're thinking about obstructive sleep apnea. And I think we all might sort of scratch our heads and be like, "This is a neurology podcast. Why should I, as a neurologist, care about obstructive sleep apnea?" But I think you laid out a very convincing argument in the article. Walk us through why we should care about this. Dr Lee-Iannotti: Absolutely. So, for neurologists, sleep matters, and I hope that my article translates that. Obstructive sleep apnea, which I'm gonna call OSA, is incredibly common in all of our neurologic patients, whether you see epilepsy, Parkinson's, stroke, Alzheimer's, neuromuscular, or even chronic headache patients. The prevalence of sleep apnea is as high as 70% in these patients. Dr Albin: Wow. That's incredible. That is an incredibly high number. Dr Lee-Iannotti: And if I can add, Dr. Albin, there's growing literature in multiple studies across the literature that show that untreated sleep apnea negatively impacts neurologic outcomes in our patients. So, it is really important to ask the question about sleep, and if the red flags pop up, to then screen for sleep apnea in particular. Dr Albin: I think that that's a great point for us to drill down on, and obviously you're a sleep neurologist. You're very used to screening people in the clinic. But say someone comes in, and I'm gonna have you put your former stroke hat on, and say someone comes into the stroke clinic, and you're just making sure that they're optimized on their aspirin or dual antiplatelet therapy, and you're doing secondary risk modification. How would screening for OSA fit into that? Dr Lee-Iannotti: It would be a part of that screening process to look at preventative ways to prevent strokes, whether it be primary or secondary prevention. So, we did a survey a while back, and it actually showed that 17% of stroke neurologists are screening for sleep apnea. It has quadrupled, fortunately, in the last few years due to public awareness and a lot of education that the AAN has done, in fact. So, at this point, I would say not asking about sleep apnea to a stroke patient is similar to not asking about diabetes. Dr Albin: So, we really have to be cognizant and conscious about saying, you know, "Do you snore at night? Do you have episodes of apnea, or does someone witness you stop?" Are there things that you ask that maybe I wouldn't be aware and thinking of? Dr Lee-Iannotti: Those are the right questions, and then very practically, very easy questionnaires to implement that literally take a minute that your nurses or medical assistants can administer to the patient, and the most commonly one that is used in stroke patients is called the STOP BANG, S-T-O-P B-A-N-G, which is a validated questionnaire to screen for symptoms. Dr Albin: Absolutely. So okay, so this is easy to do. We should all be doing this. If you're not, now's the time. And I suspect if they screen positive, next steps, it can be hard to get into a sleep lab, and we're gonna talk about some workarounds, but I think some of our listeners may never have spent time in the actual sleep lab. So, let's say you refer a patient and you actually can get them in for a gold standard in-lab sleep study. What's gonna happen in that sleep study? Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah. And I just want to preface this by saying that my article hopefully highlights that we've come a long way where we understand that there are many neurologic populations then that can undergo home ambulatory sleep studies with just as much accuracy as an in-lab polysomnogram. But with that, I wanna say an in-lab polysomnogram is actually a highly sophisticated physiologic recording overnight, typically, unless somebody is a day sleeper. So, if I could take a minute to kinda describe the data that we're monitoring throughout the night. There is a limited EEG. We concentrate on frontal, central, occipital leads to look at sleep staging. We have eye leads. We have EMG leads on the chin and the leg. We look at EKG, flow monitors, belt, and then we also do pulse oximetry, snoring mics, and even body position sensors. So, a lot is going on. Dr Albin: This is incredible. Yeah, it truly is. I mean, this is like... I'm a neurointensivist, and so I think that you have just really outdone what I consider multimodal monitoring in your sleep study patients. I'm not even sure our neuro ICU patients accumulate that much data. All right, so tell me, they go through, and they can get this. But like you said, there's actually a lot of data that you've presented that, you know, not everyone needs to go to the in-lab sleep study. So how do you decide who actually needs to be in a sleep lab versus who can do this at home? And then how do you set them up with getting this done at home? Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yeah. The home sleep studies are really more accessible ways for us to assess for sleep apnea in our neurologic patients, especially patients who live in very rural areas and don't have access or have very long wait times for an in-lab polysomnogram. With that being said, though, Dr. Albin, I will say that there are a subset of patients who have to go into the lab, and those are patients where you suspect a sleep disorder other than obstructive sleep apnea, so like parasomnias or central sleep apnea, patients with severe cognitive or physical debilitation, like our stroke patients who are hemiplegic and won't be able to apply the home sleep study. But for the most part, I do feel like a home sleep study is a good beginner study to screen the patient. And if there are red flags, then you can always get the in-lab afterwards. Dr Albin: That's super helpful. And just from a pragmatic standpoint, will insurance cover the home sleep study? Dr Lee-Iannotti: They will, yes, and it's all about documenting. So, if I could get really practical, for neurologists, it really just requires documenting snoring, for one, whether it's noted by the patient or by their bed partner, and then any form of hypersomnia, which is daytime sleepiness or even a sense of fatigue, having low energy or napping during the day. Dr Albin: I suspect so many of our patients meet those criterias. That seems, like, wildly simple to do. Dr Lee-Iannotti: Yes. And if you wanna be the favorite referral person to your sleep neurologist or your sleep specialist, then take another step and do that STOP-Bang. And if you record a score greater than three, that automatically gets them at least a home sleep study. Dr Albin: It's amazing. And then when you get this data, again, this is really practical, pragmatic stuff, how do you get the report? Does it integrate in your electronic medical record? Does the patient bring it in? How do you get that data…

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Obstructive Sleep Apnea With Dr. Stephanie M. Stahl Aug 12, 2026

Show notes

Obstructive sleep apnea affects approximately one in four adults and is especially common among patients with neurologic disorders, including stroke, Parkinson disease, dementia, epilepsy, and neuromuscular conditions. In this episode, Dr. Stephanie Stahl discusses why neurologists should routinely screen for OSA, highlights key symptoms and risk factors, reviews important considerations when interpreting sleep studies, and outlines current treatment options beyond CPAP. Learn how recognizing and treating sleep apnea can improve quality of life, optimize management of neurologic disease, and reduce long-term health risks. In this episode, Aaron L. Berkowitz, MD, PhD, FAAN, speaks with Stephanie M. Stahl, MD, FAASM, author of the article "Obstructive Sleep Apnea" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Berkowitz is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a professor of neurology in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, in San Francisco, California. Dr. Stahl is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Sleep Medicine Fellowship Program Director at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she also serves as Sleep Laboratory Medical Director in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep, and Occupational Medicine. Additional Resources Read the article: Obstructive Sleep Apnea Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @AaronLBerkowitz Full episode transcript available here Dr Berkowitz: Obstructive sleep apnea is very common. It can cause or contribute to common neurologic symptoms, such as headache and impaired cognition, and it's a risk factor for stroke. And yet, if you're like me, you may not know too much more about sleep apnea than that. Today, I have the pleasure of talking to sleep expert Dr. Stephanie Stahl to learn what every neurologist should know about OSA. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Berkowitz: This is Dr. Aaron Berkowitz. Today I'm interviewing Dr. Stephanie Stahl about her article on obstructive sleep apnea. This article appears in the 2026 Continuum issue on Neurology of Sleep. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Stahl, and could you please introduce yourself to our audience? Dr Stahl: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I'm a sleep medicine physician and neurologist and medical director of the Indianapolis Sleep Lab at Indiana University Health. I serve as the director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship program. I'm faculty advisor for our very first student interest group in sleep medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine. I'm also actively involved in some national leadership roles, including the incoming chair of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's Education Committee and co-chair of the Academy's Inter-Scorer Reliability Gold Standard Panel. So, I really appreciate this opportunity. I look forward to our discussion. Dr Berkowitz: Me too, and we appreciate the opportunity too to get to talk to you. You have so much expertise in this area, and I certainly encourage our listeners to look at your article, which is very comprehensive and up to date, and I learned a ton from it. I didn't get much exposure to sleep neurology as a trainee, and I've always worked in academic centers where we have a sleep group and we can refer patients there. So, I have to admit, sleep may probably be the area of neurology I know the least about, and felt like I was learning something new from pretty much every line of your article, and I know our readers will too. So, your article has a lot of excellent detail for our readers on the diagnosis and treatment of this very common condition. But I'd like to keep our interview relatively high level today and focus on the essentials for the practicing general neurologist. So, to start, can you just give us a sense of what obstructive sleep apnea is, and what every neurologist should know about it? Dr Stahl: Yeah. So obstructive sleep apnea is characterized by either partial or full obstructions in the upper airway. That may sound pretty simple, but this leads to a whole bunch of issues. It leads to oxygen desaturations, arousals from sleep, leading to sleep fragmentation. This can then lead to sympathetic nervous system activation, cerebral hypoperfusion, leading to a whole bunch of symptoms or neurologic conditions. Dr Berkowitz: Great. And you mentioned this in your article, but just to emphasize, how common is obstructive sleep apnea in the general population? Dr Stahl: Yeah. So, about a quarter of the general population have obstructive sleep apnea. Much more common in many neurologic conditions. Dr Berkowitz: Yeah, so very common disorder. We are seeing patients with it quite frequently, whether that's the reason they are seeing us in neurology or not. And this leads to my next question, which is what neurologic symptoms or presenting concerns of a patient should make us think about OSA and the differential diagnosis, and what factors based on the history or the exam or the context would make you suspicious for OSA as the cause of a neurologic symptom? In other words, the patient's presenting with classic symptoms of OSA, and that's why they're seeing a neurologist or seeing a primary care doctor, but is coming for evaluation of, say, headache or other symptoms. And what symptoms would make you think of wanting to consider OSA, and then what aspects of the history or otherwise would make you want to evaluate the patient for OSA? Dr Stahl: I think a really important takeaway is for neurologists to know that obstructive sleep apnea is very common in neurologic conditions and has that potential to worsen a lot of these conditions or their associated symptoms. And so, it should be on our radar. There are certainly some basic questions and signs and symptoms that we can ask patients about or, or take a look at on exam. And so particular symptoms include snoring. Anybody that snores loudly or frequently, that's a strong risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea. If someone's seeing them stop breathing in their sleep, if they are waking up a lot throughout the night. There are some other symptoms that we may not necessarily attribute upfront to obstructive sleep apnea, such as nocturia, nocturnal reflux, night sweats. There are some daytime symptoms, of course, too, like unrefreshing sleep, daytime sleepiness, morning headaches, an important one in neurology. And then we take a look at the patient's exam. And so, some things that neurologists might want to be thinking about are people with obesity are certainly at a risk for obstructive sleep apnea. But it's also very important to know that someone does not need to have obesity in order to have obstructive sleep apnea. We look at neck size, other morphologic characteristics, such as how much that we can see in the back of their mouth. Can we see their uvula? Does their tongue size appear large in their mouth? And then some other risk factors too, such as male gender, older age, family history, post-menopausal state in women. All that being said, though, sometimes in neurologic conditions, we don't have all of those symptoms or risk factors to be thinking about. And so, in certain neurologic conditions such as stroke where obstructive sleep apnea is very common and has the potential to increase the risk of another stroke, we may need to be thinking about testing these patients even with minimal symptoms or other risk factors. Dr Berkowitz: That's very helpful. So, you mentioned their headache might be the presenting symptom, right, to a neurologist, and we should certainly be thinking about obstructive sleep apnea as a potential diagnosis, even the cause of the patient's headache, particularly you said patients with morning headache. I often try to think about in patients presenting with, for memory loss, or other cognitive concerns, and that may be due more to inattention from poor sleep, so asking about sleep and symptoms of sleep apnea in those contexts. Are there any other presenting neurologic symptoms not particularly related to sleep? I'm thinking of headache, memory loss, other symptoms that would make you think, "Oh, I should actually screen this patient for sleep apnea also." Dr Stahl: Yeah, other symptoms to think about in pediatrics, hyperactivity, people that have impaired vigilance, as you alluded to, that poor attention. Sometimes people get misdiagnosed with ADHD, and it's actually just a manifestation of obstructive sleep apnea. Dr Berkowitz: You alluded to this, Dr. Stahl, that stroke, for example, patients are at higher risk of developing sleep apnea as a result of stroke, and it's also a risk factor for stroke. What other neurologic conditions, primary neurologic diseases, put patients at a higher risk of OSA? And again, similar to the last question I asked you, what are some clues that we should evaluate for? We might be following a patient for their post-stroke care over time and not necessarily thinking about diagnosing a separate condition in them since we're following them for their stroke or their degenerative disease. What are the conditions that put patients at a higher risk of OSA as a result of the condition, and then when would you think about screening them for it? Dr Stahl: Some particular neurologic conditions where obstructive sleep apnea are very common, in addition to stroke and, and TIA, include Parkinson disease. It can worsen a lot of the motor, cognitive symptoms, sleep disruption that we can see in Parkinson disease. Very common in all causes of dementia, but in particular Alzheimer disease and Lewy body dementia. Very common in neuromuscular conditions. We should definitely have obstructive sleep apnea and all forms of sleep-disordered breathing high on our radar. In conditions like myotonic dystrophy. Charcot-Marie-Tooth is another one where obstructive sleep apnea is very common. Myasthenia gravis, it can worsen the symptoms of that. In particular, a pearl is if somebody has morning weakness in myasthenia gravis, obstructive sleep apnea should be high on your radar. And also, as you mentioned, any forms of headaches. There are some other things too. If somebody has poor seizure control, especially nocturnal seizures, you might have obstructive sleep apnea on your radar as well. Dr Berkowitz: So, I think you've covered essentially every category of neurologic disease, right? We have cerebrovascular, movement, neurodegenerative, neuromuscular, epilepsy, all conditions where either the disorder itself, such as stroke or the, correct me if I'm wrong, the neurodegenerative disease puts the patient at risk. Or the patient may be at risk for exacerbations of their disease, as you mentioned in myasthenia. I love that pearl. Not fatiguable at the end of the day, but if the patient with myasthenia is telling you they're feeling weaker at the beginning of the day, then think about obstructive sleep apnea and that obstructive sleep apnea worsening control of epilepsy due to poor sleep. So really a lot of bidirectional interactions with this common condition. Okay, so if we're concerned about obstructive sleep apnea, again, myself, a general neurologist speaking perhaps on behalf of other general neurologists, we see a patient with headache or reporting memory loss that we find to be impaired attention, or we see exacerbation of their underlying primary neurologic disease. As you mentioned, we think, "Oh, I've listened to this podcast. I've read Dr. Stahl's article. I should probably be thinking about OSA in this patient, and I should order a sleep study." Now, I admit when I get the sleep study back, I scroll to the bottom, I see they do have obstructive sleep apnea, I'm going to send them over to a sleep specialist. But for the general neurologist, what are some high-yield pearls and some pitfalls to be aware of when we get sleep studies for obstructive sleep apnea, and we are looking at the results? Dr Stahl: The first thing is to understand that there are two main types of sleep studies: in-lab polysomnography and home sleep apnea test. In-lab studies are typically what we consider the more accurate type of study. Main reason for that is that we have EEG, so we can see if someone is awake versus asleep. Most home sleep apnea tests do not utilize EEG, and so when we're looking at respiratory events, apneas or hypopneas, we're looking at over the total recording time rather than the total sleep time. So, we know we're going to capture some time where a person is awake, where we don't have sleep apnea events, and that can be a big amount of time in people with insomnia, poor sleep efficiency. And as a result of that, it can lead to an underestimation of the apnea-hypopnea index. That's really important for people to understand that that means we can end up with a false negative home sleep apnea test, or it can put them in a category of lower severity than what they actually have. And so, if you get a home sleep study report back that's negative for sleep apnea and you remain concerned, you need to go on to do an in-lab study, where about twenty to fifty percent of people will go on to have a positive in-lab study. You can also get false positives with home sleep apnea tests too, and so ideally, we should only be doing home sleep apnea tests in people that are at high risk of having obstructive sleep apnea to decrease our chance of false positive study. When we get that sleep study report, what's important to take a look at? So the main number that we look at currently is the apnea-hypopnea index. The number of apneas, which are full obstructions in that upper airway, or hypopneas, partial obstructions in the upper airway where either there's an oxygen desaturation or an arousal associated with that. Less than five is considered to be normal. Anything five or more gives them a diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea, and then we stratify them based on the AHI. But it's important to take a look at more than just the apnea-hypopnea index. And while my eyes too on various reports like echocardiograms want to jump to the impression, it is important to take a look at that full report, see what their oxygen levels averaged and what they dipped down to. The arousal index, which is how many times a patient may have woken up briefly throughout the night. Take a look at the histogram, usually an image at the bottom of their report that shows what sleep fragmentation may have been like so that you can take that all in and make that decision. How important are these study findings, and is this a person that would benefit from treatment? Dr Berkowitz: That's a fantastic overview of sleep studies and some of the highlights to look out for, even if we won't be understanding every detail as you would to know most importantly the caveats about home sleep testing having a fairly high percentage of false negative and false positive results. So being wary if our suspicion is high, and that test is normal or inconclusive to get an in-lab sleep study. And if our suspicion is low or maybe we haven't ordered the test and the patient has had it done elsewhere, and the history doesn't really match u…

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August 2026 Sleep Neurology Issue With Dr. Karin Johnson Aug 05, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, Lyell K. Jones Jr, MD, FAAN, speaks with Karin G. Johnson, MD, FAAN, who served as the guest editor of the August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. They provide a preview of the issue, which publishes on August 3, 2026. Dr. Jones is the editor-in-chief of Continuum: Lifelong Learning in Neurology® and is a professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dr. Johnson is a Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine–Baystate and the Sleep Medicine Division Chief at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts Additional Resources Read the issue: continuum.aan.com Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @LyellJ Guest: @drsleepykarin Full episode transcript available here Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about subscribing to the journal, listening to verbatim recordings of the articles, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Albin: All right, welcome all. For the first time ever in the history of Continuum Audio, we are coming to you live from Chicago here at the AAN annual meeting. And now over to your host, the one and only editor-in-chief, Dr. Lyell Jones. Dr Jones: Welcome, everybody. My name is Lyell Jones, editor-in-chief of Continuum, and I'm here today with Dr. Karin Johnson, and we're interviewing Dr. Johnson for the upcoming and recently published issue of Continuum on Sleep Neurology. We have been doing Continuum Audio for a while, but we're doing something different this time. As our listeners online can tell, we are recording this for the first time ever with a live studio audience at the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois. So, this is a fun experience for us. I hope it's been fun so far for you, Dr. Johnson. Dr Johnson: Great to be here. Dr Jones: It's great to have you. So, before we get into the interview, I do wanna introduce our team here for the live recording of the podcast. You've already heard Dr. Casey Albin's voice. Dr. Casey Albin is an associate professor of neurology at Emory University. Also serves as one of our associate editors at the journal and one of our Continuum Audio interviewers. So, she's going to be working the crowd today. Let's have a round of applause for Dr. Albin. And our guest of honor today is Dr. Karin Johnson. Dr. Johnson is a professor of neurology at UMass Chan Medical School and, Baystate Medical Center in Massachusetts. She is a world-renowned expert in sleep neurology and is the guest editor for the most recent issue of Continuum on Sleep Neurology. Dr. Johnson, welcome. Why don't you introduce yourself to our audience? Dr Johnson: You did a great introduction, but I'm a clinical sleep medicine specialist. Spend my days seeing patients, taking care of people with narcolepsy, sleep apnea, restless legs, everything that comes my way. And then I have a side interest in doing sleep medicine advocacy, especially for permanent standard time. Dr Jones: And we may get to that. I mean, that might be part of our conversation today. So, you've now read all of the articles in this issue, and it's a really great issue. There's a lot of new developments in sleep neurology. There are some updates for clinicians, people who see patients with sleep disorders that I think are, are timely and important updates. You have this unique view because you have just read all of these articles, really good articles by expert authors. When you read through these, Dr. Johnson, what was the biggest, what was the biggest thing that surprised you? Dr Johnson: I think the biggest surprise for me is just so many changes in, in all of these articles. I realized how easy it was for us to make a journal that is so different from a few years ago. Whether it's Dr. Stahl's obstructive sleep apnea and new ways to think about endotyping sleep apnea that is gonna have treatment implications or the new treatments that are out there like tirzepatide, the changes that we're having with restless leg treatment. I particularly wanted to have a chapter on circadian neurology that Dr. Abbott did a great job really highlighting how if we think about the timing of when we give meds, the timing of when we eat, how that really can help neurological health, brain health, overall health, as well as mental health and cognition, especially as the AAN thinks about brain health as a whole, not just treating our patients, but how we can treat the population of people by improving sleep. I like how we hit on all these different areas in this issue. Dr Jones: And I don't know how you managed to do it. They're just a small number of articles. We cover a lot of existing territory with well-characterized diseases, with new advances. But there's a lot of new stuff in sleep, and so somehow, it's all packed in there. It's really impressive. One of the things I was gonna ask you about was an evolution, and this has been a number of years now in how we manage restless leg syndrome. When I was training, it was all about dopamine agonists, and that was your first line. And over time, the evidence has supported moving away from that, and now we have more recent guidelines that have come out, and it's really the alpha-two delta-one calcium channel antagonists. How is that transition going? Do you still see people in practice who come in on dopamine agonists? How is that going? How's the field responding to that? Dr Johnson: That's one of my most frequent restless leg consults. So even though it's been years since I have really initiated dopamine agonists in my patient, every day we get in people often on very high doses of dopamine agonists, and their doctors have just been escalating and escalating these meds over the years, and they come in with horrible augmentation. Their symptoms are much worse than they used to be, happening earlier in the day. And so, trying to get these patients off of these meds that are addictive, the way I like to teach about it is these dopamine agonists are the Fioricets of the sleep world. We know they work great, but in the long run, the patients are gonna be worse overall. And so, it's so hard to get people off these dopamine agonists, just like it's so hard to convince a headache patient that they don't need their Fioricet and that they're gonna be better off if we can get them off of it. What I think has really changed is we have more options to use. So, the alpha-delta-like agonists like gabapentin are now considered first line, but there's a lot of patients who they just don't work well enough with or they don't tolerate. And so, what do you do in that case? It's easy when that works, but and, when that doesn't work, we are being much more aggressive these days with iron replacement, potentially even trying to push ferritin levels in refractory patients up to three hundred, and using IV iron rather than just oral iron to get over the absorption issues to get the brain levels high enough. Motor stimulators, little cuffs that kind of go around the leg and stimulate the peroneal nerve in a certain way that not only can give people immediate relief, but also some data that suggests that over time it actually lessens their restless legs. We have agents like dipyridamole that work on the adenosine system in a sort of new novel pathway at addressing restless legs. And then the opiates, often meds like methadone or Suboxone can be used in some patients. But as we're getting more of these other options, often we don't need to go to those levels because we do have more to work with. Dr Jones: So, the key point is lots of options. We're not starting with dopamine agonists anymore. And I think the fact that you're still seeing a lot of patients who have been initiated on that probably tells us there's an education gap field that we need to work on. So, another thing that I noticed reading through the issue was, and this feels like a change over the last few years, is the availability and the tendency to use in-home sleep apnea testing as opposed to formal, traditional in-lab. And that feels like a great new option, and maybe that increases and improves availability for patients who need access to the test. But how do you work through that? Dr Johnson: So, I love in-home testing. We've been using it for over a decade. Other parts of the country where insurances didn't sort of mandate it are now being more mandated. I think the real change happened for a lot of places over the pandemic when labs closed down. But I think it's good because it brings a lot more patients to us. They get tested, they get tested quicker. People who would say, "I would never go into a lab. Oh, I'll do a home study." So, it just does bring more people in, and it gets them to treatment that they need that can really be life-changing. But it's not for everybody. The biggest people are people that have other bad pulmonary issues. If you're on oxygen therapy, you should not be getting a home study. That really should be a group of people that come in the lab. Similarly, if you have bad COPD, you probably should be getting a full in-lab study, so we can get more monitoring. Central sleep apnea is an interesting one. It can be very hard in some cases to differentiate the centrals and obstructive nature as well on a home study. Doesn't mean you can't do a home. So, if it's a person that just can't get an in-lab study easily, maybe you start with the home. If it looks purely obstructive, and you're all set, then you got an answer, and you can move on. But if you get back a home study that looks questionably central, they're gonna need to come into that lab. So, if you already know they're high risk because they're on narcotics, cause they have congestive heart failure, it's usually worth going straight to the lab. But again, you may consider a home study based on the patient. Patients that really cannot use the equipment can also be an issue. So, if they've had a debilitating stroke and have no one to help them put on that device, or cognitively they just can't handle the device, they're gonna be someone who's gonna benefit from coming into the lab and getting the help from the techs. So, those are the big populations that you might go starting for a home. And then the other thing that confuses a lot of people, the home is only for diagnostics. It really isn't for treatment. So, I have patients that say, "Oh, like, you can just titrate my CPAP with a home study." No. So if it's a treatment decision where they're not doing well on treatment, or I need to figure out do they need CPAP or BiPAP or IVAPS or one of these more complicated treatments, those are people that are gonna need to come into the lab to get that treatment portion of the evaluation. Dr Jones: What a great summary. That's like everything I needed to know about who do I need to bring into the lab and who do I think maybe could do an at-home study. Really great. And speaking of devices, I think all of us who see patients in the room here and our listeners out there online have experienced patients, and this feels like a very recent phenomenon to me, are coming in with their commercial at-home wearable device. And they have printouts sometimes, and they show me their phone, and they give me some numbers that I don't really know how to interpret. Reading through this issue, I learned a couple of great new words. I learned about orthosomnia, right? So, people who become so preoccupied with their sleep, it keeps them awake at night, literally, right? I mean, it's a complete paradox. I learned about nearables, so things that aren't necessarily wearables that are just in the room while the patient is sleeping that monitor proxies for sleep quality, sleep stage, and other things. And I frankly, I'm not really sure what to tell patients. So, what do you tell patients who come in with all the data? Like, or how do you tell patients to use these? Dr Johnson: I think these devices can go both ways. So, I do kind of say the pros and cons of these devices. I think for a lot of patients, they're empowering. It's getting them to think about sleep, to wanna know how good their sleep is. Are they getting enough sleep? So, if it's used in those ways, it's gonna be very helpful. I actually had a patient last week, and they noted that they're having big desats all night and could show me essentially an overnight oximetry data rather than me having to order it, and I had days of data, which sometimes can be too much. But in this case, it's like, oh, when he was on his side that night, he looked a lot better, so I can use that to give advice to the patient about particular treatments. He actually went down to Mexico, and a doctor friend gave him oxygen therapy while he was there randomly. And we could see on the nights that he had the oxygen therapy, it did really help his central sleep apnea pattern. And so that pushed us towards saying, "Let's qualify you for that up here in the States." So, I think in some cases it can give really important data. Now, I saw a posting on social media the other day of someone saying, "Can I get advice on how to improve my REM sleep? My tracker says I have no REM sleep, and I need to do something about it." There's really not data to support needing to do something about it. And so, I do think it can get some people on these wild goose chases, trying to get to a certain percentage of sleep. And these trackers, they're good in a lot of ways, but they're not perfect. He could be getting REM sleep that the tracker on him does not show. You want to relate it to what symptoms are they having. I think they can be very good for trying something out. So, let's say someone, has their tracker telling them they get five hours of sleep, and they try this intervention, and that helps them show that they got the seven hours of sleep, or they went from no REM to REM and it goes in the right direction. It can help give them that positive feedback that something they're trying, is working. But the absolutes for any given patient, it's hard to over-- What does it mean if it says you've got a 50% score versus a 70% score? That may or may not be meaningful in any given person, but again, they can compare themselves to themselves. If they were a lower score and now they're a higher sleep score because they did something that was meaningful, and that goes along with them feeling better, that can help give them that positive feedback to do something good. Dr Jones: So, a little bit of a mixed picture. Dr Johnson: Yeah. Dr Jones: Sometimes they help. Sometimes they distract. Hopefully- Dr Johnson: And as a provider, sometimes it can be overwhelming because they're like, "Come look at my year's worth of data." And you're like, "No." Dr Jones: Yeah. Dr Johnson: You know, let me see one page or two pages of data and be like, "Yep, okay, I get it." Dr Jones: Just show of hands in the audience, who in the room wears a sleep device at night, like a ring or a, some kind of sleep monitoring app? That's about half the audience. Dr Johnson: This is why they're he…

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Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms and Arteriovenous Malformations With Dr. Edgar A Samaneigo Jul 29, 2026

Show notes

Unruptured intracranial aneurysms and arteriovenous malformations are frequently discovered incidentally on neuroimaging, presenting complex decisions around monitoring, referral, and treatment. This episode highlights key risk factors for rupture, the role of imaging in evaluation, and practical approaches to triage and management, including when specialist intervention is warranted. In this episode, Gordon Smith, MD, FAAN, speaks with Edgar Samaniego, MD, FAAN, authors of the article "Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms and Arteriovenous Malformations" in the Continuum® June 2026 Cerebrovascular Disease issue. Dr. Smith is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a professor and chair of neurology at Kenneth and Dianne Wright Distinguished Chair in Clinical and Translational Research at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Dr. Samaniego is a professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and radiology and the director of the vascular neurology fellowship at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. Additional Resources Read the article: Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms and Arteriovenous Malformations Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @GordonSmithMD Guest: @esamaniego Full episode transcript available here Dr Smith: Have you ever ordered an MRI of the brain and found a coincidental unruptured aneurysm or perhaps an arteriovenous malformation? If so, are you up to speed on how to manage this common situation, how to monitor, when to refer, and how to counsel your patients? If your answers to these two questions are yes and or no, then please keep listening. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Smith: This is Dr. Gordon Smith. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Edgar Samaniego about his article on unruptured intracranial aneurysms and arteriovenous malformations. This article appears in the June two thousand twenty-six Continuum issue on cerebrovascular disease. Edgar, welcome to the podcast, and maybe you can briefly introduce yourself to our listeners. Dr Samaniego: Yeah. Thank you, Gordon. So, I'm an interventional neurologist. I'm practicing at the University of Iowa. I've been in Iowa for the last ten years. I'm originally from Ecuador. Did my residency in Wisconsin, and then I went to Stanford for neuro critical care and stroke. And then I did my neurointerventional fellowship at the Baptist Cardiac and Vascular Institute in Miami. Dr Smith: You're a triple threat in the world of vascular and critical care, which I want to get to later. But your article's really great. I'll admit one of the first things I do when I read an article for Continuum Audio is I see how long it is. I saw yours was as long as the rest, and I was a little surprised because this sounded like a simple topic. But having read it, it's anything but simple. This is really important and complex stuff. I wonder if maybe you can orient our listeners to the importance of this. We frequently find unruptured aneurysms or vascular malformations on brain imaging that we order for something else. I mean, how common is that, and why do you think our listeners need to be particularly attentive to our conversation today? Dr Samaniego: It's pretty frequent that we see patients with unruptured brain aneurysms. A lot of times, you know, we do imaging like CT angiograms, or magnetic, resonance angiography. Patients come to the ER with headaches, and we find an unruptured aneurysm. And you know, the question always comes, "What should we do with this aneurysm that we found?" We know that a lot of these aneurysms will not rupture, but the caveat is that when they rupture, like fifty percent of these patients may die or have bad outcomes. So, it's always a puzzling question, you know. What should we do with the aneurysm? Dr Smith: Well, thanks, Edgar. I mean, this is certainly something that I come across. I'm glad to hear that other people struggle with this as well. What actually is the prevalence of aneurysms in the general population? How common is this? Dr Samaniego: It's more common than what we think, you know. The, the estimates talk about like one in every fifty people have a brain aneurysm, and about every eighteen minutes an aneurysm will rupture. In the United States, there's approximately thirty thousand ruptures per year. So, there's a significant number of, of patients affected by brain aneurysms. And, and the key thing is that affects usually younger patients who are in the most productive years of their lives. So that's why it shouldn't be ignored, and once we find an aneurysm, we have to have all the information for triaging and deciding on treatment of these aneurysms. Dr Smith: Well, it's a great way to begin our conversation. I mean, this is not a rare problem. It's a common problem, and there's actually a really great section of the article I'll refer people to about medical malpractice and the importance of recognizing and dealing with this thoughtfully. It's an empowering section, not a scary one, but this is important for our listeners to know about. Pretty high-stakes stuff. Maybe you can orient listeners like me or maybe simple neuromuscular people. What different types of aneurysms are there? Dr Samaniego: That's the interesting question because there's multiple types of aneurysms, and there is a whole spectrum of aneurysm. When we say aneurysm, you can be talking about a fusiform versus a saccular aneurysm. We tend to classify them based on shape, also location. But the two main classifications for brain aneurysms will be saccular, which, you know, has a sac kind of morphology shape, and then you have the fusiform aneurysms. Those are the main morphological classifications. Then on top of that, you have two other subtypes that you see quite often. The one that we see is mycotic aneurysms that is like a misnomer because it's not a fungal aneurysm. It's just an infectious aneurysm that most of the time we see on the setting of endocarditis. These behave a little bit different than the typical saccular or fusiform aneurysms. And then also you have other more rare types of aneurysms like blister aneurysms that are sometimes located in the anterior wall of the carotid artery. So, you know, within this spectrum, we have those main aneurysms. The typical aneurysms, which can be fusiform or saccular, and also the more atypical, which can be mycotic and also blister-like aneurysms. Dr Smith: I wonder if you might comment a little bit on the relevance of the type of aneurysm, fusiform, saccular, blister, and then location on rupture risk or prognosis.You have a really great figure about anatomic classification in the article actually that I encourage everyone to check out when they hopefully read it. But what do these characteristics imply for risk? Dr Samaniego: Yeah. This is very complex question because, you know, entails different characteristics of aneurysms such as shape, the location, morphology. So, we know that some locations, for example, the anterior communicating artery has a high risk of rupturing as opposed to patients such as the part of ophthalmic aneurysm, which are usually located at the origin of the ophthalmic artery in the internal carotid artery. So, by risk of rupturing, the highest risk is usually the anterior communicating. Then you have posterior communicating artery aneurysms, which are usually located in the internal carotid artery, but because of their proximity to the origin of the posterior communicating artery, they're called posterior communicating artery aneurysms. Then you have the posterior circulation aneurysms on top of risk of rupturing is the top of the basilar artery location. Those three are the highest risk for rupturing: ACOM, PCOM, and top of the basilar. In terms of morphology, I always tell my patients, you know, if it's like a nice-looking aneurysm that has this rounded shape is a benign morphology. If you have the aneurysm that's having these Mickey Mouse ears that has these blebs or daughter sacs, those are aneurysms that usually scare us because those are the ones that usually rupture. So that's another criteria, morphology. And then the other criteria would be size. There is this magnificent study called ISUIA, which was published several years ago, and basically what it demonstrated was that aneurysms that are seven millimeters or larger are more likely to rupture versus smaller aneurysms. So those are the three criteria that I'm looking into when talking to patients about morphology, location, size, and the, the shape or morphology of the aneurysm. Dr Smith: So, let's say a general neurologist or comprehensive neurologist practicing in a community setting in a rural area orders a, let's just say a CT or CTA for a patient with a TIA and finds what looks like an aneurysm. What's the next step in terms of imaging? What's the best next step? I mean, there are a bunch of different imaging modalities. Do you get an MRA? Is it time-of-flight, contrasted? You know, when do you get a DSA and so forth? Dr Samaniego: Yeah. The first thing to do is to better characterize the aneurysm. Order of more accurate imaging that we can obtain without being invasive with a diagnostic cerebral angiogram. The rest will be a magnetic resonance angiography with contrast that, you know, gives you really good detailed information about the aneurysm. Similar in terms of quality and precision will be a CT angiography. The caveat there is with CT angiography is that, you know, you use radiation, and the patient has to get iodine. And then under those two, you will have a time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography, which doesn't use any contrast, but then you lose a little bit of quality in terms of the imaging and some morphological features you might miss. So usually what we do in my practice, I don't wanna do a diagnostic cerebral angiogram, and somebody has to refer an unruptured aneurysm. I try to do CT angiogram as a baseline, see how the aneurysm looks, and then for follow-up, I usually do magnetic resonance an- angiograms with with contrast. If there is a concern that the aneurysm has some dangerous features like it's irregular in shape, it's, it's larger, it's in one of these high-risk locations, might be better just to refer the, the patient to a specialist for a diagnostic cerebral angiography. Dr Smith: So, you know, there are these scales that you talk about in the article. There's phases in the UIATS that are used to predict rupture risk and guide decision-making. Are these scales that general neurologists or non-vascular neurologists can use to guide care? I'm thinking of like Chad-Baskin, ASBAD, which, you know, all our residents know about. Should we all be familiar with these scores? Dr Samaniego: I think they're very helpful in the sense that it will give us some guidance. Some of the characteristics of the scale might be up- outdated. For example, like ancestry. Although it's been described more in Japanese and Finnish populations, and North American, not as much as these two other populations. We do see a lot of aneurysms in people from North America and other backgrounds. For example, one of the biggest critiques for the phases is that doesn't take into account smoking history. Smoking that we know is a risk factor. And the other critiques for phases is that, for example, if you are older than seventy years old, you will score one point, which will increase your risk of aneurysm rupturing. Having said that, we do see like tons of aneurysms on younger patients, actually the most productive years of their lives that they rupture. So, it gives you some parameters like the presence of hypertension, the size, as I said, seven or larger, previous history of subarachnoid hemorrhage, and the location of the aneurysm. But it doesn't take into account other factors like smoking or morphological features of the aneurysm. Dr Smith: Now, you mentioned size. I'd like to maybe go back and talk about a case from your article, which I found really impactful. For our listeners, this is a sixty-four-year-old woman who had a five-millimeter ACOM aneurysm. She was imaged serially, didn't change over the time period, and then two years later ruptured with devastating consequence, right? And so that's a small aneurysm. Most aneurysms, I guess, are small aneurysms. I just wonder, when you see a patient like that, how do you handle the discussion regarding risk? And how do you decide when to refer them for an intervention? Dr Samaniego: Yeah. It's always puzzling when we see these smaller aneurysms. And this example is a typical example of a patient that doesn't follow the rule of seven or larger aneurysm size for rupturing. We see that quite often on aneurysms located in the anterior communicating artery. Just this last week, I treated two patients with similar characteristics, with smaller aneurysms, like average size between four and five, that rupture, and both were located in the anterior communicating artery. So, we know that there is definitely a linear relationship between size and risk and rupture, but we do see a lot of patients that have smaller aneurysms, like three, four, five millimeters that rupture, and we don't really understand very well the, biology of these aneurysms. So, when we see these aneurysms, we try to maximize the characterization of the aneurysm with better imaging, try to see the morphology. And usually when an aneurysm is discovered, what we do for follow-up is a six-month follow-up with some type of imaging, CTA, MRA with contrast, and see if there's has been any change in, on the aneurysm. Dr Smith: So, is it fair to say that a knowledgeable non-vascular neurologist can safely manage these patients, follow them over time using what they learned from reviewing your article, identify patients who have higher risk aneurysms based on the characteristics you summarize, and refer them to a tertiary center? When I get these, it's easy for me to have our vascular neurosurgeon see them or a vascular neurologist, right? But in a community where you may not have ready access to that subspecialist, is it still important to get all of these patients to a tertiary center? Are there select instances where a community-based general neurologist can follow them and then refer if there's change in size, for instance? Dr Samaniego: Yeah. I think that everything else that we do in neurology, it's important to do some type of triage in referring some of these patients for further studying and expert opinion. I think age and size of the aneurysm, age of the patient and size of the aneurysm are huge factors. For example, if we have an older patient in their nineties and has incidentally found two-millimeter aneurysm in a low-risk location like the parathalmic, that patient probably needs to be seen locally. I don't think merits a full workup. As opposed to a younger patient with a three-millimeter aneurysm located in the ACOM. I think that type of patient probably needs to be referred to a tertiary s-stroke center for workup. I mean, most of the time what's gonna happen is that if it's a small aneurysm with benign…

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Transitional Stroke Care and the Road to Recovery With Dr. Mona N. Bahouth Jul 22, 2026

Show notes

The period immediately after hospital discharge is a critical yet often overlooked phase in stroke recovery, marked by both heightened vulnerability and opportunities for rapid brain repair. This episode explores the concept of transitional stroke care, emphasizing early specialist follow up, coordinated multidisciplinary support, and targeted interventions to improve outcomes and reduce complications. In this episode, Katie Grouse, MD, FAAN, speaks with Mona N. Bahouth, MD, PhD, FAAN, author of the article "Transitional Stroke Care and the Road to Recovery" in the Continuum® June 2026 Cerebrovascular Disease issue. Dr. Grouse is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a clinical assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco in San Francisco, California. Dr. Bahouth is the medical director of the Brain Rescue Unit and an associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Additional Resources Read the article: Transitional Stroke Care and the Road to Recovery Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Guest: @MonaBahouth Full episode transcript available here Dr Grouse: A lot of attention has been paid to what happens within hours to days of a stroke, but are we missing an equally crucial time in our patient's recovery after their discharge? Today, I have the opportunity to interview Dr. Mona Bahouth about the latest issue of Continuum on cerebrovascular disease. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Grouse: This is Dr. Katie Grouse. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Mona Bahouth about her article on transitional stroke care and the road to recovery. This article appears in the June 2026 Continuum issue on cerebrovascular disease. Welcome to the podcast, and please introduce yourself to our audience. Dr Bahouth: Thank you for having me. I'm Mona Bahouth. I'm a stroke neurologist in Baltimore, Maryland, and I'm the medical director of our brain rescue unit at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Great to be with you. Dr Grouse: Thank you so much. This was a very interesting article. I have to confess going into it, I really didn't know a lot about transitional stroke care and the growing sort of recognition of its importance for stroke recovery and improved outcomes. Can you tell me what the key message from this article is that you really hope that readers will take away after reading it and hopefully integrate into their own patient practices? Dr Bahouth: Yeah. I would say if there's one overarching message, it is that stroke care has come so far over the last couple of decades. We do so much wonderful life-saving work in the first couple of hours and days after stroke, but we haven't really paid as much attention to what happens once a patient leaves the hospital with this devastating acute disease. And I would just like to say that this article allows us to shine a light on providing a little bit more of a system of care, a more structured system of care that could benefit the patient for the long term, then that will benefit a large population of patients who otherwise may have complications that could cause disability longer in life. Dr Grouse: Now, Mona, could you tell us in a nutshell, what is transitional stroke care, and why are we needing to focus more of our attention on this to improve patient recovery? Dr Bahouth: Yeah. Over the last few years, we've really done a wonderful job of reducing the time that a patient spends in a hospital after stroke care. But in parallel, we have not really changed anything about what we do in the outpatient setting. So, a patient tells us that they come to the hospital with this acute and very scary and disabling disease. They feel that they're the center of the universe at our stroke centers, where we're hustling around them in groups and in interprofessional teams. But then on the day of discharge, they feel that they leave the hospital, and in some of our focus groups, that they kind of go home to a, a dark bedroom where they have to process all of this sort of on their own. It's quite a transition for both patients and their care partners. And here we've been very systematic about how we structure our care in the hospital for stroke patients, but once they leave the hospital, it's been a sort of free-for-all, or the Wild West, as some of my colleagues say. So transitional stroke care is really a way to extend the care that we deliver in the stroke unit to the patient's home or to their next phase of care. We know that stroke patients have 11 handoffs from beginning to end, in average, that they experience through the course of their acute stroke. And so, what we're really trying to do is extend the, the stroke unit to the patient's home or to their next phase of care so that they feel a bit more extension of that specialty care that they were receiving in the hospital. So, it's really a structure, a system. Dr Grouse: Now, it seems that when we're thinking about the transitional care period, that it really hinges on this idea of sort of the sensitive period of stroke recovery. What is that, and why is that so important, and why do we really need to focus on that specific time? Dr Bahouth: There are really two reasons that this is a critical period for patients. One is that we know from work in animal models as well as other sort of human early studies that the brain really has its optimal period of efficient brain repair in the first few weeks after stroke, meaning that it's recovering after this injury and figuring out how to reroute some really important brain functions. I would say it's also a critical period because the time period after stroke is a period that all the comorbid conditions that sort of conspired to cause a stroke are sometimes destabilized. And we know that sort of just putting people back on standard regimens for their hypertension, their diabetes, their heart failure doesn't always equate to sort of long-term improved outcomes at a time that the brain itself is going through changes. So, for example, we know that blood flow is critical to the brain. That's what all the hustle is about in the hyperacute period. And for the next couple of weeks after a stroke, autoregulation remains disrupted, so typical treatments of hypertension could have negative consequences for a subpopulation of patients. This management of hypertension needs to continue for a couple of days and weeks after stroke, and therefore, if a patient is discharged from the hospital, really requires a bit more specialty input. We also know that as the brain is trying to repair during the sensitive period, this high period of efficiency, we really want to inject high-intensity, high-quality activities that really improve their recovery. But in our current system in the United States, our transition to the period of rehabilitation is really quite clunky and disrupted and doesn't often happen in a seamless way. So, a true transitional stroke care program really attempts to manage the stroke itself. The comorbid conditions that conspire to cause the stroke, and the expedition of, of rehabilitation that could really jumpstart the recovery period in a more meaningful way. Dr Grouse: Now, you mentioned hypertension as being sort of a critical factor that can affect the patients during this transitional period or this sensitive period. What are some other factors that can really play a huge part in their long-term outcomes in this really sensitive time? Dr Bahouth: In our transitional stroke program, in our interprofessional group, we often talk about all of the changes that a patient is required to make at the time of stroke. Typically, they stay in the hospital several days. The patient and their care partner will receive a bolus of instructions about what their new healthier life should look like, and then they're sort of sent off to sort of self-manage without really accepting that that wasn't the perfect time to teach these things. So really, it's all about sort of lifestyle improvement. How do we get into a system of medication adherence when medications are a central portion of a patient's care? It is about managing the cognitive changes that happen after stroke, whether we acknowledge them in the hospital as a main deficit or something that people realize once they get back into the groove of their usual life, and the emotional consequences of stroke for both the patient and their care partner, who are both adjusting to this very scary moment that resulted in a brain injury. So, I think that the things that are focused on are both medical in terms of, you know, what are we doing with the diabetes? Is our glucose at a target range? Have we started wearing our sleep apnea paraphernalia? Are we managing our smoking cessation as much as we should? How have we done with our low-fat diet? Are we taking our medications as prescribed, or was there some cognitive blip that caused a mistake? But also sort of the emotional support that sometimes paralyze patients into sort of saying they cannot handle this transition into a new healthier way of brain recovery. Dr Grouse: Yes, and it sounds like when patients sort of hit that wall, they almost just give up, right? There's just so many things they have to manage. They're emotionally trying to cope, and then they may eventually get to their neurologist at some point for a follow-up, and not much has happened. Dr Bahouth: That's a really well-put statement. Like I mentioned earlier, we had several focus groups to say, "How's our stroke center doing? How is our comprehensive stroke center doing?" And we realized that we were very comprehensive while the patient was with us, but then the experience of the patient going home was really opposite of receiving comprehensive care. You know, the patient in the hospital said they felt well-supported, surrounded, quite busy all the time, but then they did go home, and this sort of set in that they've had a stroke. And many patients told us, "I just laid in bed because I couldn't quite kind of get through the thought that this has happened to me." And so, in our prior state of our comprehensive stroke system where patients weren't seen for a couple of months after their discharge, patients would tell me, "Well, I'm fine now. But those first couple of months, I sure wasn't. You know, I was laying in bed. I was crying. I wasn't taking my medicines. I had a lot of despair and fear." Care partners would say, "I wasn't sleeping myself. I was watching to see if another stroke was gonna happen every minute." So, there are a lot of elements that are going on in those first two weeks that really require a specialist to say, "This is normal. This requires more attention," and to really help people get through a lot of the changes that come with stroke and brain injury. Dr Grouse: Now, your article gave a really great, I think, example, where you had a juxtaposition of a hypothetical patient with a stroke and two very different post-discharge courses, one where they really kind of fell into that vacuum, that post-discharge vacuum, where they didn't get support and had some very disappointing outcomes versus a patient who did have a transitional care program with a lot of support post-discharge, and a lot of obstacles were overcome and problems solved such that the patient could do a lot better. And I encourage our listeners to take a look at it. If you could design and run it, how would your ideal transitional post-stroke program be structured? Like, how would you design it so that it would optimally support these patients? Dr Bahouth: Yeah, you know, we, um, tangle with this every day in our current transitional stroke program that we call the JSTEP program. We've had several chapters of what we think is ideal for a patient, and thank you for sort of acknowledging that, like, the way those cases were written were really to underscore that we can have a lot of influence for patients. And while they were sort of hypothetical juxtapositions of one another, these are things we literally see every single day for our stroke patients. And people say, "Oh, if only we had done this, we would've caught that, and we would've prevented such-and-so." Some of the indicators of success have been we've really reduced our readmission rates to the hospital. We have decreased our length of stay because the confidence people feel to go home because they're well supported. So there have been indicators of success. But if I could take our program even next level, I would probably include a few other things. So currently, some of the strengths of the program are that a stroke specialist sees a patient within days of their discharge from the hospital, a time where some of those questions are sort of raising for the patient. Maybe a complication is starting to pop up that we can address before it, uh, gets out of hand and requires a readmission. We can tackle some of the fears that patients are having to say, "I wonder if this is normal or not. I better just go to the hospital." So, some of that early touch point by a true stroke specialist is really critical. And that visit only happens because the seed is planted in the hospital, so there really has to be some initiation of the program at the time the patient is in the hospital to say, "This is what you can expect when you leave here. You have someone who's walking this with you. They're a stroke specialist. They're gonna know how to help you navigate." The second part of our program that is a success is our rapid connection to specialties. So, we know that stroke patients are gonna need connection to rehabilitation specialists, physiatrists, the therapists. We know they're gonna need connection to cardiology when atrial fibrillation or heart failure or something is really at an extreme.We know endocrinology might be a part of the patient's story going forward. And so, I think the second success of our program is really alliance with key stakeholders in a stroke patient's life and quick access to having the patient be connected to what it is they need in the moment that we realize that there is a situation at home. The third thing that I think has been really a success of our program is this interprofessional education that we schedule patients for at the time of their discharge, just as any other important healthcare visit. During this interprofessional education session, the patients get to meet dietician, pharmacist, nurse, therapist, where key discussions about healthy behaviors, avoidance of complications after stroke really happen in a group session where there can be a lot of interaction. You know, currently our education happens in a time where the brain is injured, the patient is not sleeping well in the hospital. We have a lot of stress and fear. It's not the perfect time for anyone to receive such important education. So, I think the third really most important thing has been this formalized interprofessional education to really bolster the education that started at the hospital. If I were to really take our program next level…

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