Sleep hygiene in adult epilepsy patients: a questionnaire-based survey

Two hundred and seventy epilepsy patients referred to the Epilepsy Centre of the C. Mondino Institute of Neurology and 230 healthy subjects comparable for age, sex and education completed a sleep questionnaire of 112 multiple choice questions including those that concern sleep hygiene practice. The percentage of subjects with habitually inappropriate sleep hygiene habits was significantly higher in controls than in epilepsy patients for 7 out of the 9 sleep hygiene practices considered (P at chi square less than 0.05). No significant relationship between kind and/or severity of epilepsy and the degree of sleep hygiene practice was found. The data show that sleep hygiene practice is more adequate in epilepsy than in control subjects. It is possible that the appropriate sleep hygiene practice of epilepsy patients derives from the fact that they habitually refrain from a lot of practices which possibly aggravate both the course of epilepsy and seizure-related complications.