Prevalence and determinants of sleep disorders in a community in rural southern India

. We assessed the prevalence of sleep disorders among people above 15 years of age from a rural area of Puducherry, south India.

. We did a community-based cross-sectional study among people residing in four service area villages of a rural primary health centre in Puducherry, India. Probability sampling techniques were used to select participants. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index was administered to detect sleep disorders among the participants. The data were entered and analysed using EpiData entry 3.1 and Stata 12 software, respectively. Association between various individual factors and sleep disorders was assessed using generalized linear models adjusting for clustering at the household level and expressed as prevalence ratio with 95% confidence interval (CI).

. The mean (SD) age of the 501 participants was 38.3 (15.4) years. Poor quality of sleep was present in 36.3% (95% CI 32.2%-40.6%). In multivariate generalized linear model, age >60 years (adjusted prevalence rate ratio [aPRR] 1.68; 95% CI 1.11-2.53), female sex (aPRR 1.57; 95% CI 1.18-2.08), living in a broken family (aPRR 1.47; 95% CI 1.06-2.02) and having a television in their sleeping room (aPRR 1.40; 95% CI 1.40-1.79) were independently associated with poor quality of sleep.

. A high prevalence suggests that sleep disorders are a problem in the rural community too. Capacity building among the existing health workforce to identify and treat sleep disorders and health education activities focusing on sleep hygiene among the general public are needed to tackle sleep disorders in the community.