Roughly half of patients with cancer have symptoms of insomnia, and many may have sleep problems that linger for at least a year, a small study suggests.
Up to 10 percent of adults in the developed world suffer from chronic insomnia, and cancer patients are particularly prone to it, researchers note in Sleep Medicine. Even though sleep disorders have been tied to worse outcomes for cancer patients, research to date on hasn’t offered a clear picture of what circumstances might make sleep problems more likely in people being treated for tumors.
For the current study, researchers examined data on 405 cancer patients in Germany who were 59 years old on average and completed two assessments of insomnia severity: once when they joined the study and again twelve months later.
