Patients with Crohn’s disease improved sleep disturbance with a stepped-care approach that included brief behavioral therapy, according to study results.
Eva Szigethy, MD, PhD, of the visceral inflammation and pain center at the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues wrote that behavioral interventions for insomnia have shown promise in sleep improvement and fatigue in some patients with chronic diseases.
“The feasibility of sleep interventions has not been tested in young adults and adolescents with CD,” they wrote.
The study was part of a two-phase open trial that explored interventions for sleep and fatigue. The 12-week intervention included two steps. First, was a brief behavioral therapy for sleep in IBD (BBTS-I) for 4 weeks. The second phase (BUP-SR) added the psychotropic medication bupropion for 8 weeks in the subset of patients who continued to experience fatigue.
Fifty-two patients participated in phase 1 of the BBTS-I intervention, and in phase 2, 33 patients were part of the BUP-SR plus BBTS-I arm and 19 were in the BBTS-I only group.
