Iranian Journal of War and Public Health

Aims: Disability due to the spinal cord injury has the potential of complication in different systems of the body. These expanded complications affect the quality of life of victims in different aspects. One aspect of the quality of life is sleep quality in patients with spinal cord lesions. The aim of this study was to determine the quality of sleep in spinal cord injury patients.

Instrument & Methods: This descriptive-analytic cross-sectional study was conducted in 2014. The population study was all patients with spinal cord injuries who were admitted to Khatamolanbia Hospital, Iran, 100 of them were selected by simple random sampling method. The data was collected by demographic information and Pittsburgh Standard Sleep Quality questionnaires and was analyzed by SPSS 19 software using independent T, ANOVA, Pearson correlation coefficient tests.

Findings: 82 patients were male and 88 patients were married. 64 patients were veterans and 48 patients had pectoral injury. The mean score of sleep quality was 11.90±2.35. The most prevalent components were sleep disturbances and subjective sleep quality in men and subjective sleep quality and delays in falling asleep in women. In general, sleep disorders was more common and disorder in daily function was rarer. Quality of sleep were different significantly (p<0.05) in patients based on gender, marital status, body mass index, underlying disease and the neck size.

Conclusion: Sleep disorders and poor sleep quality are highly prevalent in patients with spinal cord injury.