Sleep problems are highly prevalent among Medicaid patients with serious mental illness and are associated with greater inpatient and emergency mental health service use. Those are findings of researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education published in the September Psychiatric Services. They studied a sample of 1,560 Medicaid patients whose psychiatrists were asked to provide information on their diagnoses, medications, sleep problems, treatments, psychiatric hospitalizations, and use of emergency services. Overall, 78 percent of the patients were rated by their psychiatrists as having some sleep problems. Patients with sleep problems had greater odds of psychiatric hospitalization and of emergency service use compared with those with no sleep problems.
The researchers characterized their results are "a first glimpse at a significant clinical problem with far-reaching implications for service use and cost of care in this patient population."
Sleep problems can also lead to metabolic syndrome. Read more about this dangerous condition in Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/2/27.full.
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