Insomnia in older HIV-positive patients

Insomnia is a common sleep disorder in elderly. Although the HIV-positive population have a similar life expectancy when compared to the general population, some factors may interact with immunity conditions and therefore contribute to a worse prognosis.

This is a review of literature that aims to identify prevalence of insomnia in older HIV-positive patients.

This is a review of literature conducted by using MEDLINE-PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, Web of Science, Scopus, SciELO, LILACS, and VHL databases, in addition to conducting manual searches. The terms used for the search were related to prevalence, HIV, insomnia, and advanced age. Inclusion criteria were: cross-sectional, cohort, and longitudinal studies, patients with a previous diagnosis of HIV in old age, studies reporting the frequency of insomnia or insomnia symptoms. The criteria for exclusion were: clinical trials, animal studies, letters, abstracts, conference proceedings, studies with other sleep scales that did not include insomnia.

There were 2,805 publications found in the database and a further 10 articles were included manually. Of this total, four were included in this review, resulting in a total of 2,227 participants. The prevalence of insomnia in HIV-positive patients over 50 years varied from 12.5% to 76.5%.

The frequency of insomnia was higher in the profile of the population studied than in the general population. This should be clinically relevant in order to adequately treat and impact on the prognosis of those patient.