Sleep Phenotypes in Chronic Pain Sufferers: Application of Machine Learning to a Large Database
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Chronic pain affects over 100 million American adults. There is a negative reciprocal relationship between chronic pain and sleep. As many as 80% of chronic pain patients report poor sleep quality and daytime fatigue. We have recently reported on the clinical benefits of fixed-site high-frequency transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (Quell, NeuroMetrix, Inc) in a chronic pain cohort. In addition to delivering therapeutic neurostimulation, this device collects health data including utilization, sleep measures, and activity metrics. The data is communicated to the patient through a smartphone app and aggregated in a cloud server. This digital health database presents a novel opportunity to study population characteristics in a large cohort of chronic pain sufferers. Objective: Our primary objective was to use machine learning techniques on a large database of sleep data in chronic pain sufferers to determine “sleep phenotypes.” The long-term goal of this research is to develop personalized therapeutic profiles that optimize sleep in chronic pain patients. Methods: De-identified data from device users consenting to have their data uploaded to a cloud server was analyzed. Individual users were characterized by their median sleep data. The analyzed sleep parameters included total sleep time (TST, hours), sleep efficiency (SE, %), periodic leg movement index (PLMI, events/hour), position change rate (PCR, events/hour), and time out of bed (OOB, minutes). K-means clustering was used to partition the data set into 3 mutually exclusive clusters based on TST, PLMI, PCR, and OOB. The optimal number of clusters was determined by the Silhouette value. Clustering was based on the correlation metric. One-way ANOVA was used to test whether the 3 cluster groups had a common mean for each sleep parameter. For parameters with differences in group means, t test was used to identify which pairs of means were different. Results: A total of 389 users with 5 or more nights of TST between 4 and 12 hours were included in the analysis. The sizes of the 3 clusters were 161 (41.4%), 147 (37.8%), and 81. None of the sleep parameters had the same mean among three clusters (P<.001). The 3 clusters represented 3 sleep phenotypes. The largest group (n=161) was a “good sleeper” phenotype characterized by a mean TST of 7.3, SE of 95.2, and low PLMI (2.1), PCR (1.3), and OOB (1.4). The second largest cluster was a “moderate sleeper” phenotype characterized by a mean TST of 7.4, SE of 92.4, low PLMI (3.9) and PCR (0.9), but relatively high OOB of 12.7. The third cluster was a “poor sleeper” phenotype characterized by TST of 6.6, SE of 91.2, and a high PLMI of 11.7. All pair-wise cluster means were different (P<.025), except for TST between good and moderate sleepers (P=.452). Conclusions: We identified 3 sleep phenotypes in a large cohort of chronic pain sufferers. The phenotypes reflected a progression from good to poor sleepers. The poorer sleepers were characterized by either a large amount of time out of bed during the night or a high rate of periodic leg movements.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".