REVIEW article
Front. Pain Res.
Sec. Pharmacological Treatment of Pain
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpain.2025.1609524
This article is part of the Research TopicPain-Related Sleep Impairment: Expression, Mechanisms, and Treatment StrategiesView all 4 articles
At the Intersection of Pain and Sleep: A Roadmap for Preclinical Pain Research
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Biozentrum, Faculty of Science, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The complex relationship between pain and sleep has received increasing attention for its therapeutic potential. Over half of chronic pain patients suffer from sleep disorders, and poor sleep is a strong predictor for pain in clinical populations. Understanding the bidirectional relationship between pain and sleep is crucial for developing improved clinical treatment strategies. This review provides 1) a primer on preclinical methods used to measure sleep behaviors, 2) an overview of neural circuits at the intersection of pain and sleep, and 3) considerations for future pain and sleep investigations and treatment strategies.
Keywords: Sleep, Pain, pain and sleep comorbidity, pain and sleep interference, neural circuitry, Translational research
Received: 10 Apr 2025; Accepted: 12 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Diester and Joo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Clare M. Diester, clare.diester@unibas.ch
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.