Abstract

Introduction: Sleep disorder is prevalent in hemodialysis patients. Treatments such as air way positive pressure and medicines are not usually available or have side effects. Acupressure is a non-invasive method from traditional Chiness medicine. It is proven useful in some studies in treatment of sleep disorder.

Aim: This study surveyed the effect of acupressure on quality of sleep in hemodialysis patient.

Material and Methods: This is a random clinical trial and sample consisted of 62 hemodialysis patient who had sleep disorder. They were randomly divided into experiment and control groups. The experimental group recived acupressure 3 times a week for four weeks while they were under dialysis. The control group only received the routine treatment. The quality of sleep was measured before and after intervention by pittrosburg sleep quality index. Also sleep log was used to record the sleep pattern and finally descriptive and analytical statistics, chi-square. Mannwitney, were used.

Results: Finding showed a significant difference between the experiment and control group on quality of sleep based on pittrosburg sleep quality index and recovery in domain of subjective quality of sleep (p=0.042), time needed to fall sleep (p=0.007), overall time of sleep (p=0.017), habitual sleep efficiency (p=0.001), sleep disorder (p=0.024), daily activity disorder (p=0.002) and overall score (p=0.0001). Also sleep log showed that overnight sleeplessness decreased and patients' quality of sleep increased and this recovery started from first week of intervention and continued up to one week after intervention.

Conclusion: This study indicated that acupressure promotes hemodialysis patients' quality of sleep and it's a non-inasive treatment of sleep disorder in the patients.

Keywords: Acupressure, Nursing Care, Renal Dialysis, Sleep Disorders