Evaluation of sleep quality among elderly women: A Population Based Survey in Shiraz, Iran

Background and Aim: Older age population shows an increasing proportion of population in Iran. According to the last national census of Iran in 2016, elderly adults constitutes 7414091(9.27%) of total population (79926270); including 3658405(49%) males and 3755686 (51%) females. Thus, elderly women are more than half of the community elderly . Changes in sleep patterns can influence the quality of life in this group. Therefore this study was conducted to assess the sleep quality among shiraz elderly women Materials and Methods: This 1.5 years population based screening survey was conducted in 2016-2017 and 216 elderly women were selected through a multistage cluster sampling method. Their sleep quality was evaluated by Pittsburgh questionnaire .Data was analyzed in SPSS Results: 56 percentage of elderly women suffered from sleep disorders. Which includes 52% moderate sleep disorder and 13% severe sleep disorder. Various factors such as quality of life, marital status and chronic pain had an effect on sleep disorder in elderly women.Conclusions: Our study showed that more than half of the elderly women suffered from sleep disorders, which can affect all aspects of their lives and cause poor quality of life. On the other hand, sleep disturbance is associated with low quality of life, in addition sleep disturbances such as latency, decreased sleep duration and increased frequency of awakening are more prevalent in which those have consistent chronic pain relative to those with low pain intensity. We concluded that the marital status had correlation with QOS; singles had poorer QOS compared to marrieds. This may be explained by more social supports in the latter group. Therefore, policy making and interventions should be aimed at improving the factors affecting elderly women sleep disorder

Keywords:

sleep disturbance , elderly women , quality of life , chronic pain