Insomnia: prevalence and associated factors

Abstract

Nowadays sleep disorders are very common and affect most of the population, the most common may be insomnia. Insomnia is defined as the difficulty of initiating or maintaining sleep it, may also be reflected in an early wake up and by the presence of a non-restful sleep and it is associated with impairment in social and occupational functioning of the individual. Knowing the prevalence and the associated factors of insomnia.This is a cross-sectional epidemiological study. The population is constituted by 205 individuals of both sexes, aged over 18, who were in public places of a city in the north of the country. We applied a questionnaire to all the people who went through these places between 9 am to 7 pm. Insomnia was evaluated using the DSM-IV(Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). We use the Chi-square to study the relation between the independent variables with variable insomnia, adopting a confidence interval of 95%. The prevalence of insomnia was 46.8%. Who suffers more from insomnia are: women in menopause (64.1%), elder people (66.7%) and those with four or fewer years of education (73.9%). There was no significant statistical relationship between the prevalence of insomnia and sex or residence. The causes of insomnia are: concern (48.6%), noise (31.8%) and disease (8.4%). The drugs most consumed by insomniacs are benzodiazepines (79.2%). In this study insomnia affects about half of participants. The presence of insomnia seems to be related with the age increasing, low education and menopausal status in female