Circadian sleep-wake disorders were recognized as a group of disturbances by its own only when chronobiology and sleep research began to interact extensively in the last two decades of the 20th century, according to a review article in the July issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. The authors note that sleep medicine as a medical specialty with its own diagnostic procedures and therapeutic strategies could be established only when key findings in neurophysiology and basic sleep research allowed a breakthrough in the understanding of the sleeping brain, mainly since the second half of the last century.

Read the article in JCSM – The Development of Sleep Medicine: A Historical Sketch