Sleep Disturbances in Family Caregivers: An Overview of the State of the Science

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Sleep disturbance is a prevalent and complex issue within the family caregiver population that affects the overall health of the caregivers themselves and their care recipients. However, there is limited evidence to support the efficacy of current practice and a lack of consensus regarding the optimal treatment protocol. This article will provide an overview of sleep research in family caregivers. It explores current trends in sleep research and identifies relevant conceptual and methodological issues, suggesting implications for further research and highlighting the need to improve sleep quality in the caregiver population.

Section snippets

Methods

The search strategy was designed to find literature related to sleep disturbances of family caregivers of a person with various disease conditions. Three electronic databases, MEDLINE, the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and PubMed, were reviewed, and reference lists from retrieved articles and relevant citations were collated. The databases were searched from the date of their inception until November 16, 2009, without regard to the language in which articles were

Research trends identified

This review included reports of research that involved family caregivers of patients with various types of diseases. Among the 44 relevant studies identified in the literature, the most frequent diseases the care recipients had were dementia (39%), various cancers (25%), Parkinson's disease (11%), or congestive heart failure (9%). Other conditions included osteoporotic fracture, intellectual disability, or situational problems in context, such as hospice care, care in an intensive care unit,

Tested interventions in current research

The most commonly tested intervention reported in the literature is CBT-I, which has demonstrated efficacy in treating sleep disturbances in moderate- to high-quality randomized control trials since the 1970s.

McCurry et al. (1998) tested the use of CBT-I to improve the sleep quality for caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's. The intervention included standard sleep hygiene, stimulus control, and sleep compression strategies and education about community resources, stress management, and

Definitions of Sleep Disturbances in Family Caregivers

Sleep disturbance is an umbrella term used to describe the symptoms of perceived or actual alterations of sleep (Berger, 2009). The terminology is used by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and National Sleep Foundation. One issue is that there is the lack of consistency in the terminology used, and quite varied terms are used along with or instead of sleep disturbance. Terms closely related to sleep disturbance in the literature include sleep loss (Carter, 2003), sleep problems (Carter,

Study Participants

Sampling is one of the most challenging tasks in sleep studies of family caregivers for ensuring generalizability. The sample sizes of the studies varied widely, ranging from 9 (Carter, 2005) to 1,069 people (Kochar et al., 2007). Study sample number depended primarily on the type and level of phase of the study. Although small numbers (under 100) of participants were found in qualitative studies or experimental pilot studies, the larger samples were derived from a national-wide survey with

Implication of sleep research for family caregivers

Caregiver sleep disturbances are becoming significant issues at the national and international levels. However, most sleep studies have focused primarily on sleep disturbances in patient populations. Thus, more efforts to investigate the underlying mechanisms governing the way sleep disturbances impact the lives of family caregivers are required. The literature reviewed here provides a basic understanding of sleep disturbances and the different approaches that have been applied to address these

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