Damage to myelin, the fatty insulation wrapped around nerve fibres, produces abnormal electrical spikes in the sleeping brain, according to findings presented Friday at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026. Dr Mohit Dubey, a ZonMw Memorable Dementia Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, reported that EEG recordings from mice with damaged myelin showed spikes resembling those seen in people with epilepsy or Alzheimer's disease. Critically, the spikes appeared only while the animals were asleep.
That timing is the most interesting part. Sleep problems are common in multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative conditions, but as Dubey noted, the biological reasons behind them are still poorly understood. His work points to the loss of myelin itself, rather than some downstream consequence of illness or medication, as a possible driver of disrupted sleep rhythms.
For patients and families, the practical significance lies in what it suggests about where to look. If demyelination alters brain activity specifically during sleep, then sleep EEG could become a window onto the state of myelin in the brain, and treatments aimed at protecting or repairing myelin might also help the fragmented, unrefreshing sleep that so many people with MS and dementia describe.
These are results in mice, presented at a conference rather than published as a peer-reviewed paper, so the link to human sleep disturbance remains a hypothesis for now. Still, it gives researchers a testable mechanism connecting two features of neurological disease - white matter damage and poor sleep - that have largely been studied apart from each other.