Figure 1.

Conceptual model of sleep health. This model, similar to those proposed by many other authors, posits that various dimensions of sleep-wake function can affect distal outcomes of health and function. Intermediate processes may include epigenetic, molecular, and cellular processes that in turn affect systems-level processes. These processes, ranging from inflammation to altered function of neural circuits, are more proximally related to health outcomes. The model also recognizes that the relationships between sleep-wake function and molecular, cellular, systems and organism-level outcomes are reciprocal; just as sleep affects function and health, so too function and health influence sleep-wake function.