Sleep diary
A sleep diary , often more aptly referred to as the evening-morning log , is a record of sleep and wake times and other information relevant to sleep disorders . It is usually carried out by the person concerned or a caregiver at home over a period of two or more weeks. It is customary to record the details by handwritten entry in forms.
Use of sleep diaries
Evening-morning protocols are of fundamental importance in sleep medicine and are used in the context of diagnostics and also for follow-up checks in the case of various sleep disorders, in particular insomnias , hypersomnias and circadian sleep-wake rhythm disorders.
Even if subjectively noted information only partially agrees with the values determined by polysomnography, especially in patients with sleep disorders, the instrument can be used to the effect that it maps the information intra-individually over a longer period of time as well as apparatus-based measurement methods. There are studies on the reliability and validity of the instrument, but there is no standardization.
Content of sleep diaries
There is no standardized template. Usually the questionnaires consist of instructions to fill in at home, a questionnaire about the person and the sheet for daily entries. Information about the person (name, height, weight), the type of sleep problems (falling asleep or staying asleep, daytime tiredness, start of the symptoms) and the medication taken are requested separately. This is followed by questions for a period of one or two weeks, which should be answered in the evening and the following morning.
Every evening before the lights are switched off, entries are requested about the date, the state of health (tense to relaxed), the performance of the past day (good to bad), the degree of exhaustion, additional sleep episodes during the day, alcohol consumption and the time.
Every morning, information about the estimated time it takes to fall asleep, waking times at night, the time to wake up and the time to get up as well as the state of health (depressed to carefree) and the assessment of how restful the sleep was perceived to be entered.
Classifications are often based on a Likert scale .
Various pre-printed templates for evening-morning minutes can be found on the Internet; the German Society for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine (DGSM) offers a short and a long version . For certain illnesses such as narcolepsy, there are sleep diaries with special items.
Sleep quality levels
Sleep quality has a subjective and an objective level. The subjective level includes the assessment of the person concerned about the duration of sleep, lying awake time, the frequency of waking up processes and also the result in the form of perceived recovery, the well-being after waking up and sufficiently long wakefulness on the following day. The objective level includes measured sleep duration, sleep latency, REM latency, proportion of the various sleep stages and the fragmentation of sleep. Differences between subjective and objective assessments of sleep quality can always be observed; in the case of existing sleep disorders, further discrepancies arise due to the affected person's changed perception of sleep.
Side effects of these questionnaires are that the patient feels that his sleep problems are being taken seriously, that he himself deals more intensively with the questions asked and with the factors that influence sleep when answering the questions, which can contribute to changes in behavior towards better sleep hygiene and improves treatment compliance in the long term .
Supplementary diagnostic tools
The individually managed sleep diary can be supplemented and objectified using actigraphy .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b S3 guideline for non-restful sleep / sleep disorders of the German Society for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine (DGSM). In: AWMF online (as of 2009).
- ↑ a b Information from the DGSM on sleep diaries ( memento of the original from January 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 28, 2013.
- ↑ Sleep diary especially for narcoleptics at the Swiss Narcolepsy Society (SNaG) , accessed on December 27, 2012.
