ArticleeLife2025
Fractal cycles of sleep, a new aperiodic activity-based definition of sleep cycles.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sleep EEG foundation models reveal within-stage microstructure that improves health screening beyond traditional stages.Research square · 2026Article
- Global neural oscillations underlie performance variability and attentional state fluctuations in humans.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Aperiodic and periodic neural activity during sleep in autism spectrum disorders.BMC medicine · 2026Article
- Mapping nocturnal arousal across sleep and pain disorders.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in humans.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Hemispherotomy leads to persistent sleep-like slow waves in the isolated cortex of awake humans.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Aperiodic neural activity distinguishes between phasic and tonic REM sleep.Journal of sleep research · 2025Article
- Aperiodic EEG signatures: unveiling the interplay between APOE ε4 and mild cognitive impairment subtypes.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2025Article
- Multiple Intrinsic Timescales Govern Distinct Brain States in Human Sleep.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Sleep cycles are defined as episodes of non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep followed by an episode of REM sleep. Fractal or aperiodic neural activity is a well-established marker of arousal and sleep stages measured using electroencephalography. We introduce a new concept of 'fractal cycles' of sleep, defined as a time interval during which time series of fractal activity descend to their local minimum and ascend to the next local maximum. We assess correlations between fractal and classical (i.e. non-REM - REM) sleep cycle durations and study cycles with skipped REM sleep. The sample comprised 205 healthy adults, 21 children and adolescents and 111 patients with depression. We found that fractal and classical cycle durations (89±34 vs 90±25 min) correlated positively (
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.