Show Notes
Insomnia affects neurologic health, quality of life, and daily functioning, but effective treatments are available. In this episode, Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews discusses a practical approach to evaluating chronic insomnia, highlights the importance of identifying contributing conditions such as sleep apnea and mood disorders, and reviews cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), the recommended first-line treatment. Learn how addressing sleep can improve outcomes across a wide range of neurologic disorders. In this episode, Katie Grouse, MD, FAAN, speaks with Brandon R. Peters-Mathews, MD, FAAN, FAASM, author of the article "Insomnia" in the Continuum® August 2026 Sleep Neurology issue. Dr. Grouse is a Continuum® Audio interviewer and a clinical assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco in San Francisco, California. Dr. Peters-Mathews is the Section Head of Sleep Medicine at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle, Washington. Additional Resources Read the article: Insomnia Subscribe to Continuum®: shop.lww.com/Continuum Earn CME (available only to AAN members): continpub.com/AudioCME Continuum® Aloud (verbatim audio-book style recordings of articles available only to Continuum® subscribers): continpub.com/Aloud More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com Social Media facebook.com/continuumcme @ContinuumAAN Host: @BrandonPetersMD Full episode transcript available here Dr Grouse: Insomnia may be one of the most common medical issues experienced by patients, yet our knowledge about how to manage it remains limited. Today, I have the opportunity to speak with one of the world's leading experts on sleep disorders, Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews, about the latest issue of Continuum on Neurology of Sleep. Dr Jones: This is Dr. Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio. Be sure to visit the links in the episode notes for information about earning CME, subscribing to the journal, and exclusive access to interviews not featured on the podcast. Dr Grouse: This is Dr. Katie Grouse. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews about his article on insomnia. This article appears in the August 2026 Continuum issue on Neurology of Sleep. Welcome to the podcast, and please introduce yourself to our audience. Dr Peters-Mathews: It's my pleasure to join you, and I'm happy to talk about this article. I think it's an interesting one for most folks. I am a board-certified sleep neurologist. I practice at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle. I did my neurology training back at the University of Minnesota and my sleep training at Stanford University. I've been in practice for more than thirteen years at this point. It's hard to believe, but it's exciting to be able to speak with you today. Dr Grouse: This is definitely an important topic for everybody. Certainly, sleep and the lack of it affects all of our patients, and I can't imagine there's a single clinical neurologist who doesn't have to answer questions and help evaluate patients with this problem, so very high-yield topic for everyone. Now, having read your article, I'm curious if you had to choose one key point that you want the readers of your article to take away after reading it, what would it be? Dr Peters-Mathews: Emphasize for my patients that insomnia is a condition that we can work through and resolve, that if we really can understand the underlying contributing causes and resolve those issues, we can typically improve sleep. It's a process. It takes time. It takes some attention and, and sometimes even testing to figure out what's going on. But if we can dial into these root causes, we can typically help somebody to sleep much better. As part of that, we often employ a therapy called CBT-I, which we'll talk about here a little bit later. But that also helps us to identify some of these contributing factors that are leading to the poor sleep. Dr Grouse: And
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