The Effects of a Brief Intervention for Insomnia on Community Dwelling Older Adults

Oh, Eui Sun; Park, Kyung Mee; An, Suk Kyoon; Namkoong, Kee; Shim, Da hye; Lee, Eun

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
Insomnia is one of the major concerns in the elderly population. Cognitive behavioral treatment for insomnia is the first line treatment option, but there are some limitations including time and cost burdens and the requirement for sufficient cognitive resources to obtain a proper treatment effect. The Brief intervention for insomnia (BII) is a treatment that focuses on behavioral aspects of insomnia in primary care practices. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of BII in community-dwelling older adults.
METHODS
A total of 47 older adults with insomnia were enrolled from community centers between May 2016 and January 2018. They participated in the BII program for three weeks. We gathered sleep-related participant information with using the Pittsburgh sleep quality index (PSQI), the Sleep hygiene index, and a sleep diary. Clinical efficacy was evaluated by comparing total sleep time (TST), sleep latency (SL), waking after sleep onset (WASO), and sleep efficiency (SE) before and after the treatment.
RESULTS
There was significant improvement in sleep-related features after BII. Global score and sleep quality from the PSQI, freshness, and WASO from the sleep diary showed statistically significant improvement.
CONCLUSION
We found BII showed positive clinical efficacy in community dwelling older adults, especially from the perspective of subjective sleep quality and WASO. This finding implies that BII can be effectively applied for the managment of elderly insomnia patients in a community setting.