You probably know someone who went in for an overnight sleep study after years of snoring and daytime fatigue.
Most people walk out thinking it was just about catching their breath at night. The same wires on their chest may be seeing more than anyone realized.
Researchers led by a team at Emory University have trained an artificial intelligence model that reads a single overnight ECG from a routine sleep study. It can flag heart failure risk up to 10 years in advance.
Writing in the journal SLEEP, the group reported that people with the highest model scores had a 69 to 133 percent higher risk of heart failure than those with the lowest.
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The signal for atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, was even larger at 103 to 172 percent higher. Stroke risk rose by 19 to 40 percent, and the risk of dying from any cause over the decade was 65 to 82 percent higher.
The team trained the model on 15,809 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital. They then tested it on two independent groups, 9,810 patients at Emory University Hospital and 12,576 patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
The pattern held after they adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, diabetes and high blood pressure. It also held after adjusting for sleep measures like how often breathing paused during the night.
What the model is actually reading
The tool does not need a full hospital workup. It uses just one chest lead, the same patch worn during a standard sleep study, and watches the heart's electrical rhythm across sleep stages.
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Rapid heart-rate changes during light sleep carried much of the predictive signal. The model essentially spots patterns a human reader would never catch in a single tracing.
Why a sleep study could become a heart check
Sleep studies are a common test in the United States, usually ordered when someone snores heavily, gasps at night or wakes up exhausted.
The point is to diagnose obstructive sleep apnea, a condition where the airway briefly collapses during sleep.
If regulators and clinics eventually sign off, the same overnight recording could double as a heart screen with no extra wires, no extra visit and no extra cost to the patient.
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Earlier research has already linked poor sleep quality to higher heart disease risk, but it largely relied on self-reported questionnaires. The new approach reads what the heart itself is doing while the person is sleeping.
The tool is not yet available in clinics. The researchers say it still needs further clinical validation and regulatory clearance before it could be built into routine sleep studies.
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This article is made and published by Mie Hermansen, who may have used AI in the preparation.