{"doi":"10.1093/sleep/zsae043","title":"Doctor, can napping help relieve my pain? Research path to assess the potential benefits/harms of napping for individuals with chronic pain","abstract":"Chronic pain affects around 30% of the population, and can have a significant impact on sleep quality [1]. Patients with chronic pain, as well as health care providers, may not be aware of the potential benefits of sleep-related interventions with respect to pain, although questions about the general benefits of napping are often asked by patients. However, there is probably not a single or simple answer to the question of whether individual patients should or should not nap, and if they should, there remain questions about what the optimal nap duration is, the best time of day for napping, and the frequency and duration of naps. Moreover, there is no robust evidence on the relationship between napping and pain, and whether napping has a positive effect or not. In order to answer these questions, more research on the participant is required, as is the application of personalized medicine, with proper recognition of the variability in sleep-related phenotypes/endotypes, in order to provide recommendations that are tailored and individualized to each patient, considering their idiosyncrasies and clinical characteristics. The high prevalence of comorbid sleep disorders in individuals with chronic pain, such as insomnia and sleep-disordered breathing, further complicates the task of clinicians in providing robust recommendations to patients [2, 3]. The objectives of this letter are to (1) highlight the need for a scoping or systematic review of the participant, and (2) stimulate research on the interplay between napping and pain by highlighting areas that should be the focus of future studies, so that better evidence-based advice can be provided to patients. In the United States, regular napping is reported by 15% of the general population, and by up to 25% of individuals ages 75–84 years old [4]. Among individuals with chronic pain, napping is even more frequent, with estimates ranging from 39% to 70% [5, 6]. In Japanese home care nurses, working night shifts, frequent naps of 60 minutes or more were associated with reduced musculoskeletal arm and leg pain intensity [7]. Unlike in healthy individuals, the presumed beneficial relationship between sleep and pain is unclear among individuals with chronic pain. Furthermore, it is possible that chronic pain patients with comorbid insomnia and/or sleep apnea use daytime napping to cope with the residual effects of nighttime sleep disturbances. In otherwise healthy individuals, it was observed that a 30-minute sleep extension at night, or daytime napping after sleep restriction can increase pain tolerance and reverse experimental pain sensitivity, respectively [8, 9]. In fibromyalgia patients, a study assessing the effects of daytime napping (<30 minutes) concluded that naps do not produce clinical benefits. The combination of daytime napping and fibromyalgia was associated with greater symptom severity, including increased pain intensity, depression, anxiety, memory difficulties, sleep problems, and fatigue [6]. Conversely, in a study of older individuals with osteoarthritis, napping four times a week or more did not appear to modulate the association between poor sleep and fatigue [10]. Yet it needs to be considered that napping could potentially be a marker of poor health in older adults with comorbidities. A study showed that in patients with episodic migraine, napping on average for 77 minutes was considered to be a coping strategy, and did not appear to contribute to sleep disturbances [11]. However, in patients with chronic migraine, longer naps were associated with greater headache severity and lower sleep efficiency [12]. Thus, these contradictory results make it difficult to come to firm conclusions about the benefits/harms of napping in individuals with chronic pain. Pain, like sleep disorders, cannot be reduced to a simple and single concept, as its presentation is diverse in terms of nosology, pathophysiology, symptom severity, and clinical consequences. It has three main c","journal":"SLEEP","year":2024,"id":495041,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9541,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":327016,"name":"Gabriel Natan Pires","orcid":"0000-0003-0411-0111","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1341519,"name":"Cibele Dal Fabbro","orcid":"0000-0003-0424-9076","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":943984,"name":"Alberto Herrero Babiloni","orcid":"0000-0001-5588-5916","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":854312,"name":"Marc O. Martel","orcid":"0000-0002-8143-4622","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":382474,"name":"Charles M. Morin","orcid":"0000-0002-8649-8895","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":327022,"name":"Mônica L. Andersen","orcid":"0000-0002-1894-6748","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":372154,"name":"Sérgio Tufik","orcid":"0000-0002-3804-8865","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1341520,"name":"Luciana Palombini","orcid":"0000-0003-2520-3165","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":690413,"name":"Gilles Lavigne","orcid":"0000-0003-3041-8099","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":14,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:09:15.528853Z","pmid":"38457532","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}