UICC World Cancer Congress 2006

Objective: Sleep-wake disturbances, especially insufficient sleep and daytime sleepiness, occur in healthy adolescents, and clinicians observe that these are also troubling symptoms for adolescents with chronic illness, including cancer. Because minimal research is available to describe sleep-wake disturbances in adolescents with cancer, there is limited data to guide the researcher's choice of measurement instruments to study sleep in this population.

Methods: This literature review identifies the objective and subjective techniques that have been used to measure sleep-wake disturbances in diverse samples of healthy and ill adolescents. These techniques were examined to determine which sleep parameters were included and what psychometric data was available from the studies.

Results: Actigraphy as well as a variety of subjective measurement techniques have been used in adolescent sleep research. Actigraphy is an effective objective method to measure sleep, and recommendations can be made to enhance its accuracy with adolescents. A number of self-report questionnaires, surveys, and diaries have also been used to answer questions about adolescent sleep, although these findings often fail to report reliability and validity data. Researchers may find several of these instruments suitable for the study of cancer-related sleep-wake disturbances in adolescents. Future sleep studies in oncology populations can be strengthened by the consistent use of sleep terminology, measurement of key sleep parameters, and efforts to develop and use reliable and valid instruments.