Sleep Quality Among Elderly People Within the Outpatient Department of Songklanagarind Hospital, Thailand: A Cross-Sectional Study

Objective: To determine the prevalence of sleep quality in the elderly within our outpatient department. Material and Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted by; calculating the sample size for a survey with ‘proportion to size’ at the outpatient department of Songklanagarind Hospital from; October to November, 2015. A total of 408 participants aged between 65 and 99 were interviewed. Demographic and sleep-related data were collected. Sleep quality was assessed using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) – Thai version. The results were analyzed in terms of descriptive statistics and conducted using R-Epicalc and R-Survey software. Results: Our subjects were predominantly married females. The proportion of those in the 65-74 age range was 63.0%. Most of the participants (70.8%) were poor sleepers, with mean and median PSQI scores of 7.7 and 7.0, respectively. Regarding poor sleepers, their problems were; short sleep duration (99.7%), poor sleep efficiency (61.6%) and day time dysfunction (51.6%). Conclusion: Similarly to previous studies, our findings showed a high prevalence of poor sleep quality in the elderly population. A sleep duration of less than 6 hours was the major problem in the poor sleeper group. Gaining a better insight into sleep quality correlating with comorbidities is recommended.