MedicalResearch.com interviews Jen-Hao Chen, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Health Sciences University of Missouri, Columbia.
Dr. Chen: For clinicians, it is clear from our study that insomnia questions are not good proxies of direct assessment of sleep properties. Psychiatrists should be aware that how well a patient feel about their sleep may not be equivalent to how well a patient actually sleep. The report also implies that to know how well a patient sleep, a direct assessment of sleep properties is needed because till now self-report of insomnia symptoms (instead of objective assessment of sleep outcomes) remain the sole criteria for diagnosis of insomnia in clinical settings.
