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Transcranial Electrical Stimulation in Physiological Sleep: A Review

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Nur Kader^1,2 (), Seo Ho Song^1,2,3, Brian E. Zirkel^1,2, Alison I. Poussaint^1,2,4, Tony J. Cunningham^1,2,3; ¹Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, ²Center for Sleep and Cognition, ³Harvard Medical School, ⁴Howard University College of Medicine

Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) is a safe, non-invasive brain stimulation technique using a weak electrical current to modulate neural activity when people are either awake or asleep. TES is an important tool for potentially improving patient functioning without the use of pharmaceuticals. However, there is limited data on how this method affects sleep in healthy adults. To address this gap, we are conducting a systematic review on the impact of tES on sleep in healthy adults using the Covidence platform for data collection. Since sleep structure changes with age, we focused on studies with adults (18-65 years of age) with no history of psychiatric or non-psychiatric illness to remove the likelihood of any sleep co-morbidities. Additionally, we only included original papers and excluded literature reviews, case studies, guidelines, and protocol. We included studies using various forms of tES: transcranial direct current stimulation, transcranial alternating current stimulation, and transcranial temporal interference stimulation. We excluded studies involving transcranial magnetic stimulation, vagal nerve stimulation, and deep brain stimulation. From an initial list of 1800 abstracts, we determined 52 papers fit our inclusion criteria and did a full-text review to further assess suitability. We are now extracting data on risk of bias, methodology, and sleep-based outcomes from the 29 included studies for a manuscript. For risk of bias, we are using the 2019 revised Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials. Two authors review each of the 29 included studies to reduce bias in rating and ensure thorough data extraction.

Topic Area: OTHER