A Study on Sleep in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients

Kim, Keum Soon; Yoo, Kyung Hee

Abstract

This study is to investigate sleep patterns of rheumatoid arthritis patients through a survey research. The subjects for this study were 97 patients registered in Hanyang University Hospital Rheumatoid Arthritis Center, and the period of data collection was from July 15, 1998 to August 30, 1998. The research instruments used in this study were the measures of sleep, pain, and fatigue, and SPSSWIN 8.0 Program was used for data analysis. The research results are as follows ; The patients went to bed between 11 and 12 p.m., but many of them found difficulty in falling asleep within 5 minutes. They woke up quite early at around 4 to 6 o'clock in the morning and remained in bed about 1 hour. Only 39 percent of the subject reported satisfaction with their sleep. Fifty six percent of the subjects took a nap, generally did in the afternoon and 22.7 percent of them napped for half an hour. They suffered sleep disturbance, but their sleep environments were calm and comfortable, and they turn off the light when they went to sleep. As for the quality of sleep, over 50 percent of the subjects reported not being able to sleep deeply, 30 percent of the subjects woke up frequently during sleep, 60 percent experienced frequent arousal after sleep onset. Over 90 subjects slept for 6 to 8 hours. This shows that even though they had rheumatoid arthritis, the patients remained in bed for a sufficient period of time. they also reported waking up or turning frequently during sleep. The sense of fatigue from sleep disturbance scored a relatively high 35.84 points on average against the possible score of 64 points. Behavior for sleep promotion was very active. Sleep disturbance occurred in proportion to the sense of fatigue and pain, and was negatively correlated with quality of sleep. The pain had positive correlations with the illness duration, sleep disturbance and had a negative correlation with the quality of sleep.