PREHOSPITAL CORRELATES OF SLEEP IN PATIENTS HOSPITALIZED WITH CARDIACDISEASE

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among selected endogenous factors and sleep patterns during hospitalization in patien ts with cardiac disease. Participants included 33 male and female pati ents with myocardial infarction and unstable angina. Wrist actigraph r ecordings and a computerized sleep algorithm demonstrated that the par ticipants slept for a mean of 424.55 min (SD = 114.52), had a mean sle ep efficiency of 77.30% (SD = 15.80), and experienced from 5 to 32 awa kenings each night (M = 13.94, SD = 6.29), The mean duration of nightt ime awakenings was 9.24 min (SD = 5.60). Self-reports of sleep efficie ncy, sleep supplementation, and sleep disturbance, using the Verran an d Snyder-Halpern (1990) sleep scale, were better than normative data r eported for hospitalized patients. The combination of age, gender, New York Heart Association Functional Classification scores (NYHA Criteri a Committee, 1964), and prehospitalization sleep loss explained 29% of the variance in objectively measured sleep efficiency and 46% of the variance in duration of nighttime awakenings. These findings suggest t he importance of prehospitalization variables as predictors of sleep p atterns in hospitalized cardiac patients and provide baseline data for future study. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.