Sleep Quality among Patients with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Cross-Sectional Study

To evaluate and describe the sleep quality in seven subscales among the patients with mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) and compare it with normal patterns. This cross-sectional study was conducted within a 6-month period from February to August 2014 in Shahid Rajaei trauma center of Shiraz. Participants were selected randomly from all adult (18-60 years of age) patients admitted during the study period with impression of mild TBI (GCS of more than 13). The patients’ sleep quality and demographic characteristics were evaluated by Pittsburgh sleep quality index (PSQI) and self-report questionnaire, respectively. Results were compared with normal data, which extracted from the normative data of PSQI manual. Overall we included 60 patients with mild TBI with mean age of 36.2 ± 13.4 years. All the patients had sleep disturbance. Among them there were 46 (76.7%) men and 14 (23.3%) women. The subjective sleep quality (p=0.01), sleep latency (p=0.01), habitual sleep efficiency (p=0.01), sleep disturbance (p=0.01), use of sleep medication (p=0.01) and day time dysfunction (p=0.01) were significantly lower in patients with mild TBI when compared to those with mild TBI when compared to normal values. There were no difference between men and women regarding the sleep quality. The sleep duration was comparable between the subjects and the normal values. Patients with mild TBI have poor sleep quality which should be considered as one of the main factors in interventions after the injury and it might lead to better quality of life.