References
What is known from the existing literature about how sleep is measured in HIV care? A scoping review
Abstract
The HIV care landscape has significantly altered over the past 30 years with advances in HIV medical treatment. Despite these medical advances, people living with HIV experience a significant number of issues that affect their health-related quality of life, including sleep. Although poor sleep quality is common, there remains a lack of understanding of how to identify sleep issues in order to improve outcomes for people living with HIV. A scoping review of three databases as well as the grey literature yielded 2932 articles, of which 60 met the inclusion criteria. The following themes were identified: range of methods used to assess sleep, self-reported sleep measures and objective measures of sleep. The review found that a number of different measures of sleep were used within the research, the most commonly used being the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Due to the variety of approaches being used to measure sleep (n=18) there was a lack of consistency in what aspects of sleep were being explored, and in many cases why the measure of sleep was chosen. Furthermore, there was a lack of meaningful clinical recommendations as to how these findings could be used to improve outcomes for people living with HIV.
Since the 1990s advancements in antiretroviral therapy (ART) have revolutionised the medical treatment of HIV and continue to do so. Despite the care of HIV being transformed into that of a chronic manageable condition, people living with HIV experience a wide range of issues that impact on their quality of life, one of these issues being poor sleep quality and sleep disturbances (Bourne et al, 2022).
In the wider population, poor sleep has been linked to an increase in cardiovascular disease (Malhotra and Loscalzo, 2009), diabetes (Knutson et al, 2006), obesity (Beccuti and Pannain, 2011) and reduced immune function (Savard et al, 2003). Moreover, poor sleep has consistently been linked to poor mental health as people are more likely to suffer with depression and anxiety (Goldstein and Walker, 2014). as well as suicidal ideation and behaviour (Pigeon et al, 2012). Conversely, good sleep has been strongly linked to wellbeing and it is therefore essential for health professionals to understand more about this phenomenon within HIV care (Garbarino et al, 2016).
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