Air Pollution Could Be Interfering With Healthy Sleep, App Data Shows

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 16, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Air pollution could be keeping you up at night, robbing you of sleep, a new study says.

Data gathered by the popular Sleep Cycle app shows that snooze-depriving coughs increase with levels of particle air pollution, even if pollution levels are under exposure limits, researchers reported recently in the journal Communications Health.

“This suggests that there may be no such thing as a safe threshold for exposure to air pollution, although our research is purely observational,” senior researcher Cecilia Mascolo said in a news release. She is a professor of mobile systems at the University of Cambridge in the U.K.