SLEEP PATTERNS IN PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE

More than 60% of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) suffer from sleep disturbances. Objective observation of night-to-night sleep in people with COPD is needed to better understand actual sleep patterns and identify opportunities for sleep management interventions. This exploratory study aimed to apply trajectory analysis to characterize sleep patterns in people with COPD over a 7-day period and identify patient characteristics associated with sleep patterns. This secondary data analysis included 56 mild-to-severe COPD patients with co-existing sleep disturbance drawn from the baseline dataset of an ongoing randomized control trial. Sleep was measured using an accelerometer over 5 days, and sleep variables included sleep onset latency (SL), sleep efficiency (SE), wake after sleep onset (WASO), total sleep time (TST), and number of awakenings (NA). Subjective sleep disturbance and self-efficacy for sleep were measured using questionnaires. Group-based trajectory analysis was applied using STATA 14.0. Participants were predominantly male (53.6%) and black (64.3%) with a mean age of 65.2 years. Group-based trajectory analysis showed that most participants fell into groups exhibiting short SL (76.1%), long TST (68.1%), low WASO (92.2%), low NA (67.0%), and high SE (76.8%). The short SL and low NA groups had significantly higher levels of self-efficacy for sleep than the long SL and high NA groups. Also, levels of subjective sleep disturbance in the low NA group were significantly lower than in the high NA group. This study was the first to apply group-based trajectory analysis to identify sleep patterns in the people with COPD. The irregular and impaired sleep patterns observed in study participants merit special attention from clinicians. Moreover, results support the idea that improving self-efficacy for sleep is a potential means of enhancing sleep quality in people with COPD. More research is needed to confirm these patterns and explore their outcomes. This study funded by NIH RO1 NR013937.