Case reports

Sleep Science and Practice welcomes well-described reports of cases that include the following:

• Unreported or unusual side effects or adverse interactions involving medications
  
• Unexpected or unusual presentations of a disease
  
• New associations or variations in disease processes
  
• Presentations, diagnoses and/or management of new and emerging diseases
  
• An unexpected association between diseases or symptoms
  
• An unexpected event in the course of observing or treating a patient
  
• Findings that shed new light on the possible pathogenesis of a disease or an adverse effect

Case reports submitted to SSP should make a contribution to medical knowledge and must have educational value or highlight the need for a change in clinical practice or diagnostic/prognostic approaches. The journal will not consider case reports describing preventive or therapeutic interventions, as these generally require stronger evidence.

Authors are encouraged to describe how the case report is rare or unusual as well as its educational and/or scientific merits in the covering letter that accompanies the submission of the manuscript.

For case reports, SSP requires authors to follow the CARE guidelines. The CARE checklist should be provided as an additional files. Submissions received without these elements will be returned to the authors as incomplete..

The information below details the section headings that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

Please note that your manuscript must include a 'Declarations' section including all of the subheadings (please see below for more information).

Title page 

The title page should:

•  present a title that includes, if appropriate, the study design e.g.:
  • "A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial", "X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study", "What is the impact of factor X on subject Y: A systematic review, A case report etc."
  • or, for non-clinical or non-research studies: a description of what the article reports
• list the full names and institutional addresses for all authors
  • if a collaboration group should be listed as an author, please list the Group name as an author. If you would like the names of the individual members of the Group to be searchable through their individual PubMed records, please include this information in the “Acknowledgements” section in accordance with the instructions below
  • Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript
•  indicate the corresponding author

Abstract

The Abstract should not exceed 350 words. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract must include the following separate sections:

• Background: why the case should be reported and its novelty
• Case presentation: a brief description of the patient’s clinical and demographic details, the diagnosis, any interventions and the outcomes
• Conclusions: a brief summary of the clinical impact or potential implications of the case report

Keywords 

Three to ten keywords representing the main content of the article.

Background

The Background section should explain the background to the case report or study, its aims, a summary of the existing literature.

Case presentation

This section should include a description of the patient’s relevant demographic details, medical history, symptoms and signs, treatment or intervention, outcomes and any other significant details.

Discussion and Conclusions

This should discuss the relevant existing literature and should state clearly the main conclusions, including an explanation of their relevance or importance to the field.

List of abbreviations

If abbreviations are used in the text they should be defined in the text at first use, and a list of abbreviations should be provided.