Depression is a powerful predictor of nighttime sleep disturbances among stroke survivors, according to research presented at the Nursing Symposium of the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2015.
Sleep disturbances - The duration and time intervals of nighttime sleep, the frequency of waking after sleep onset, and daytime sleepiness - are common and are associated with poor health after stroke.
Researchers studied how depression and fatigue affect sleep disturbance in patients hospitalized with stroke and three months after stroke. More than one-fifth of the total 282 patients studied while hospitalized reported sleep duration of less than six hours a night.
Of the 199 patients who completed the study at three months, 44 percent continued to suffer nighttime sleep disturbances. Depression was the most powerful factor related to nighttime sleep disturbance, whereas, excessive daytime sleepiness was associated with fatigue, brain lesion size and female gender. They also found:
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Smi Choi Kwon, Ph.D., R.N., Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea;
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