Sleep Disturbances Following Total Knee Arthroplasty

Sleep disturbances are common after total knee arthroplasty (TKA), yet literature examining sleep and postoperative pain remains sparse. With the use of wearable devices, convenient objective remote sleep monitoring is now possible. We aimed to measure patient sleep following TKA using validated questionnaires and wearable devices to compare sleep patterns to pain scores 90 days postoperatively.

Adult patients with body mass index < 45 undergoing unilateral primary TKA were enrolled. Patients wore a monitor, which tracked sleep duration and disturbances (getting up at least once during the night). They completed weekly Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) questionnaires and visual analog scale (VAS) pain scores. Sleep patterns were compared with pain scores and sleep duration was compared with PSQI responses.

There were 110 patients included with 54.5% women; average age was 64 years (range, 43-80). VAS scores decreased postoperatively. PSQI overall sleep scores, sleep quantity, and sleep quality worsened for the first 30 days then improved past baseline levels by 90 days. Recorded sleep duration did not change, and recordings did not correlate at any point with VAS scores. PSQI overall score and sleep quantity did not correlate with VAS. At 30 days postoperatively, patients reporting "very bad" sleep had significantly worse VAS scores than those reporting "bad" sleep.

Patient-reported sleep quality (very bad sleep) correlated well with VAS pain score at 30 days, while sleep duration (monitored or patient-reported) did not correlate with any clinical measure and does not seem to be a useful metric in assessing TKA outcome.