In an early study, Derogatis et al 15 found that the most frequent psychotropic prescription in cancer patients was for hypnotics, accounting for 48% of total prescriptions. 14Īnother effective way to obtain information about sleep disturbances is by extrapolating information from data on sedative/hypnotic use. 13 Another study found that patients with advanced lung cancer reported poorer sleep and more daytime sleepiness than healthy controls and that sleep disturbances of lung cancer patients were characterized by breathing difficulties, cough, nocturia and frequent awakenings, which may be suggestive of SDB. 12 In a prospective study, 15.3% of 209 patients with terminally ill cancer self-reported sleep disturbances when they registered to a palliative care unit, a rate that increased to 25.9% at their admission. 11 In a study of 100 palliative care patients attending to a pain and symptom control clinic, 72% reported sleep disturbances, among which 63% reported difficulty staying asleep and 40% reported difficulty falling asleep. It was reported that 30% of 123 patients with advanced cancers reported sleeping less than 5 hours per night, suggesting significant sleep problems. These results help identify the type of sleep complaints experienced by cancer patients.Īlthough much less studied, sleep disturbances have been reported to be very common in patients with advanced cancer. About 85% complained of sleeping fewer hours than normal, 75% complained of difficulty in getting back to sleep, and 39% reported napping at unusual times such as midmorning and mid-afternoon. The most frequent type of sleep complaint was awakening during the night, reported by more than 90% of the patients. In the second phase of the survey, another group of cancer patients (n = 20) was interviewed, 45% of which reported a sleep problem in the prior month and half of which rated the sleep problem as moderate, severe, or intolerable. Of those interviewed, 44% reported a sleep problem in the previous month, but only about 17% communicated the problem to their doctors. Engstrom et al 10 administered an extensive and sleep-specific telephone survey to 150 patients with lung or breast cancer in various stages of treatment undergoing a variety of treatments. Other prevalence studies relied on telephone surveys. In addition, they found that in greater than 50% the onset of insomnia preceded the breast cancer diagnosis however, 58% of the patients reported that cancer aggravated their sleep problems. In another survey, Savard et al 6 studied the prevalence of insomnia in 300 women with breast cancer and found that 19% met the diagnostic criteria for insomnia, with 95% of the cases being chronic insomnia. 9 Lung cancer patients had the highest or second-highest prevalence of sleep problems in general, while breast cancer patients had a high prevalence of insomnia and fatigue. In a survey among more than 1,000 patients with different types of cancer and at different treatment phases, 31% reported insomnia, 28% reported excessive sleepiness, and 41% complained of restless legs. Patients with different types of cancer reported different kinds and different rates of sleep problems.

Anderson and colleagues 8 compared 354 cancer patients, 72 psychiatric patients, and 290 non-patient volunteers and found that 62% of the cancer patients reported moderate to severe sleep disturbance, while only 30% of volunteers and 53% of depressed patients reported the same complaint. Cancer patients report higher rates of sleep disturbances than the general population.

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