Sleep hygiene in adult epilepsy patients: a questionnaire-based survey

Two hundred and seventy epilepsy patients referred to the Epilepsy Centre o f the "C. Mondino" Institute of Neurology and 230 healthy subjects comparab le for age, sex and education completed a sleep questionnaire of 112 multip le choice questions including those that concern sleep hygiene practice. Th e percentage of subjects with habitually inappropriate sleep hygiene habits was significantly higher in controls than in epilepsy patients for 7 out o f the 9 sleep hygiene practices considered (P at chi square less than 0.05) . No significant relationship between kind and/or severity of epilepsy and the degree of sleep hygiene practice was found. The data show that sleep hy giene practice is more adequate in epilepsy than in control subjects. It is possible that the appropriate sleep hygiene practice of epilepsy patients derives from the fact that they habitually refrain from a lot of practices which possibly aggravate both the course of epilepsy and seizure-related co mplications.