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EAN 2025 | Sleep highlights from EAN 2025: brain health and orexin agonists

Ambra Stefani, MD, PhD, Medical University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria,
shares her highlights from the 11th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN 2025). She highlights the focus on brain health, with sessions discussing the influence of society and the effect of temperature on sleep. She then goes on to discuss advances being made investigating orexin agonists for the treatment of narcolepsy. This interview took place at the 11th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN 2025) in Helsinki, Finland.

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Transcript

So for what concerns sleep, what I really enjoyed is that of course there is a huge focus on brain health, which is so relevant, and the brain health campaign of the EAN, I believe, is a great initiative. And there were some thoughts, like the one where I was focusing on sleep and chronotype, and influence of society. And also there was a talk about effects of heat on brain and neurological diseases...

So for what concerns sleep, what I really enjoyed is that of course there is a huge focus on brain health, which is so relevant, and the brain health campaign of the EAN, I believe, is a great initiative. And there were some thoughts, like the one where I was focusing on sleep and chronotype, and influence of society. And also there was a talk about effects of heat on brain and neurological diseases. And in both of these sessions, sleep was included. And I believe that we really need to think about societal changes, environmental changes, and how they affect sleep, because we know now that sleep is really a pillar of brain health. And both society and environment have a huge impact on sleep. And so we really need to develop strategies to counter these effects. And otherwise, of course, we had some other sessions with very different topics, oral session and poster. I believe one of the most relevant changes at the moment is the development of orexin agonist medication for patients with narcolepsy. There are several ongoing studies from different pharmaceutical companies and some data have been presented here. So we expect and patients expect that this can be really something kind of life-changing for them because it’s the first time that we will have a drug acting on the mechanism of the disease because in particular for patients with narcolepsy type 1 with cataplexy, we know that they have a hypocretin deficiency and acting on the receptor, you can kind of act really on the pathophysiological mechanism causing the disease. The hope is to have a more effective drug compared to what is currently available.

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Advisory Board: Takeda.