Healthcare Insights
Unlocking Sleep:
Connecting Data with Wider Health Conditions
Sleep is often treated as a symptom. But increasingly, it’s becoming clear that sleep both shapes and reflects wider health, influencing health conditions and recovery over time, not just how we function the next day.
Sleep is a System
Sleep is increasingly understood as a driver of physical health, linked bidirectionally to cardiovascular, metabolic and immune function.1,2
For example:
- → Sleep apnoea is linked to increased risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease1
- → Respiratory conditions such as asthma can worsen at night, fragmenting sleep and slowing recovery3
- → Short or disrupted sleep affects glucose regulation, contributing to metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes2
So, poor quality sleep isn’t just a symptom, it’s a system in action.
People don’t ‘treat’ sleep – they manage it
In buzzback’s quali-quant study of 600+ UK and US consumers experiencing sleeplessness, we saw that sleep issues were just managed continuously rather than ever really being resolved.
8 in 10 were taking Rx, OTC medication and/or supplements at least once a week, many relying on something daily.
Despite these efforts, people had often struggled for years, experimenting night by night. Half had never sought medical advice and over a third told us they didn’t feel rested even after using a sleep aid.
Instead, we observed people layering routines and behaviours alongside sleep aids or treatments for other health conditions, creating a complex system where it was difficult to isolate what was actually working and how sleep and wider health issues influenced each other.
Tracking changes the game
People don’t automatically think in terms of sleep cycles (they should!). They think in terms of how they feel first thing.
• Am I clear-headed?
• Do I have energy?
• Am I paying for last night today?
This is where self-tracking starts to matter.
Sleep data, collected over time, helps make sense of something that otherwise feels unpredictable. It highlights patterns, surfaces variability and allows people to make informed adjustments to their routines.4
So, tracking shifts sleep from disparate nightly events to something observable and improvable, over time.
This becomes even more compelling when you consider sleep observed at scale, something that came through in a recent conversation I had with Sleep Cycle. They’ve built one of the world’s largest sleep datasets, with over 3 billion nights of analysis across 75 million users. Their work, alongside scientific partnerships with leading universities, reflects how quickly this space is evolving.5
Why this matters for pharma insights
This shift to large-scale, real-world sleep observation enables a clearer view of how sleep interacts with related conditions.
Take asthma for example. Night-time worsening isn’t incidental, circadian shifts in airway inflammation, lung function and endogenous corticosteroids mean symptoms often intensify overnight, leading to waking, breathlessness and coughing.3 And while waking up is captured in clinical frameworks as a groggy recall measure, the granularity of the overnight physiological process is not.
Similarly in metabolic conditions, sleep disruption doesn’t just coexist, it actively contributes. Short and irregular sleep impairs insulin sensitivity, disrupts glucose regulation and alters appetite hormones, creating conditions for instability and progression.2
Across both, sleep is acting as both a signal and a driver of disease. But because it’s rarely measured continuously and patterns aren’t observed at scale, its role remains under-recognised in real-world management.
Closing this gap requires a different lens. One that moves beyond episodic, recall-based measures to something more continuous, contextual and connected. Pairing continuous sleep data with broader behavioural insight, integrating primary market research with data and social analytics makes it possible to truly understand how people are actually managing their condition day and night.
For pharma, this shifts the question. It’s no longer about how well a drug works, but how it performs across the night over time.
- • How are night-time symptoms shaping adherence, persistence and switching?
• Where does ongoing sleep disruption signal unmet need, even when clinical measures suggest control?
• How does what happens overnight carry into the next day, influencing patient behaviour, perception and outcomes?
If sleep is part of a wider system, then treatment success depends not just on efficacy, but on how therapies perform within a system that is constantly changing across day and night, in real life.
Sources
1. Yeghiazarians Y, et al. Obstructive sleep apnea and cardiovascular disease: JACC state-of-the-art review. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2021.
2. Reutrakul S, Van Cauter E. Sleep and metabolism: linking sleep deprivation to metabolic disease. Endocr Rev. 2022.
3. Durrington HJ, et al. Circadian rhythms and asthma pathophysiology. Thorax / related updates, 2021–2023.
4. Depner CM, et al. Wearable technologies for sleep and circadian research. Sleep Med Rev. 2020.
5. Sleep Cycle. Sleep and recovery statistics & global sleep data insights. https://www.sleepcycle.com
Karen Douglas
Commerical Director,
Healthcare Europe
If you're exploring new ways to decode real-world patient behaviour, we’d love to connect!
Healthcare Europe:
Karen Douglas, Commercial Director
kdouglas@buzzback.com
Healthcare US:
Jonathan Weiser,
Healthcare Practice Lead
jweiser@buzzback.com
