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Treating insomnia with behavioral therapy
07/Oct/2006: A new study has found that behavioral therapy might prove useful in treating insomnia in elderly people. Insomnia is a sleep disorder, characterized by inability to sleep or to remain asleep for a reasonable period and it is caused by fear, anxiety, depression, stress, excessive medications etc., This disorder is more prevalent among the elderly and if affects more than half of the adults aged 60 and over.
The study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, examined two groups of elderly people suffering from insomnia – one group of 17 patients who received a short-term behavioral therapy and another group of 18 patients who were only given information on insomnia.
Participants in both the groups were asked to maintain a sleep diary and complete doctor-administered and self-reported measures of sleep quality. The insomnia interventions were delivered in one session, followed by a booster session after two weeks. All participants were reassessed four weeks after the initial intervention session.
The study found that 71% of the participants in the therapy group, showed remarkable improvements in sleep measures and in daytime symptoms of anxiety and depression. Only 39% of the participants in the non-therapy group showed any such improvements. 53% of the participants in the therapy group met the criteria for insomnia recession, compared to 17% of the participants in the non-therapy group.
The authors of the study concluded that the preliminary findings of this study were consistent with earlier studies, which showed that short behavioral insomnia interventions are successful in treating insomnia in elderly people. Insomnia can lead to severe depression, attention and memory deficits and excessive daytime sleepiness. The findings of this study were published in the latest issue of the ‘Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine’.
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