Dados do Trabalho

Título

Sleep quality of cancer patients in a hospital in northeastern Brazil

Introdução

The symptoms experienced by cancer patients are vast, caused either by the disease itself or by the treatments used, with emphasis on sleep disorders. When cancer patients are hospitalized, getting a good quality sleep can become a challenge due to several factors such as environmental, organic and psychological.

Objetivo

To analyze the quality and subjective sleep pattern of hospitalized cancer patients and their relationship with clinical and sociodemographic characteristics.

Métodos

It was a cross-sectional, observational and quantitative research, with cancer patients hospitalized in a public hospital in Teresina-PI. It was approved by the Research Ethics Committee with Opinion No. 3197.578. Sociodemographic data, factors that could interfere with the sleep of these patients, as well as quality and subjective sleep pattern were collected through the Visual Analog Sleep Scale, which assesses the domains disturbance (0-700), effectiveness (0-600) and supplementation of the sleep (0-400). The higher the value obtained on the disorder and supplementation scales, the worse the sleep quality will be, and on the effectiveness scale, the higher the score indicates better quality sleep.

Resultados

93 patients participated in the research, most of them female (77.4%), with a mean age of 50.6 ± 15.6 years, from the interior of Piauí (57.0%), farmers (40.9%) and with elementary school education (47.3%). As for the diagnosis, it was found that 26.4% and 19.4% were diagnosed with cancer of the cervix and liver, respectively, and 18.3% of the patients were in preoperative condition and 29% in the postoperative period. In the analysis of factors that interfered with the quality of sleep in the hospital environment, fears and worries (48%) were highlighted, in addition to organic disorders (27%) and excessive light (25%), as factors that disturb the sleep of patients. As for the components of sleep quality, an average of 327.3±186.8 was observed in the sleep disorder domain, an average effectiveness of 323.9±70.5 and an average of 131.3±94.7 in supplementation. Men supplemented more sleep than women (p = 0.022).

Conclusões

It was then concluded that hospitalized cancer patients have poor quality and subjective sleep pattern and that fears and concerns are the factors that most interfere for this to occur.

Palavras-chave

Hospitalization. Oncology. Sleep.