

3 Sleep
Fundamentals
Consider a treatment
plan that helps your
patients achieve these
3 essential elements.1,2
-
Consider asking your patients:
How did you wake up?Sign up now to receive updates about the impact of insomnia as well as educational resources that may help you identify and support the management of insomnia.
-
Defining Optimal Sleep
Current treatment discussions may not actually complete the sleep evaluation if patients are not asked how they feel the next day—whether after taking medication or after a night with interrupted sleep.1
Treatment success involves 3 goals: falling asleep, staying asleep, and waking without next-day impairments.1,2
Falling asleep
Staying asleep
throughout the nightWaking without
next-day impairments -
The Benefits of
Optimal SleepIf your patient can achieve these 3 fundamental elements, it could result in several benefits:
- Improved cognitive performance and memory3,4
- Higher work productivity and attendance5
- Lower risk of chronic illness, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease6,7
- Lower levels of stress, depression, and/or anxiety8,9
- Fewer home, work, and driving accidents10,11
However, your patients may only be defining an optimal night’s sleep by the number of hours they slept. Asking how well they slept to determine the quality of their sleep is an equally important part of the conversation.
Ask your patients not only how long they slept, but also how well they slept.
-
Insomnia Treatment Approaches
Nonpharmacologic treatment includes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which is a multimodal combination of treatments that aims to change a patient’s overvalued beliefs and unrealistic expectations about sleep.2,12
The AASM Guidelines include several pharmacologic treatments for insomnia disorder.13
Pharmacologic strategies currently included in the AASM Guidelines are treatments that promote GABA signaling (benzodiazepines, benzodiazepine receptor agonists, anticonvulsants), orexin receptor antagonists, melatonin agonists, heterocyclics, and other antidepressants, as well as a number of over-the-counter preparations.13
These above pharmacologic strategies are not strongly recommended by the AASM Guidelines, indicating there is a need for new treatment options.13
AASM=American Academy of Sleep Medicine; GABA=gamma aminobutyric acid.
Recent information
from the FDAThe FDA now requires a boxed warning on certain prescription insomnia medications due to rare but serious injuries and deaths that may result from complex sleep behaviors associated with them.14