Interest in telephone nightmare counselling in patients with sleep-related breathing disorders

Abstract Background and objective Nightmares are typically underdiagnosed and undertreated, even though frequent nightmares are quite common in patients with sleep-related breathing disorders. Based on a previous study, we investigated whether patients would respond if they were specifically asked whether they would be interested in telephone counselling about nightmares and nightmare treatment. Materials and methods The present study included 537 patients with sleep-related breathing disorders who completed a nightmare questionnaire and—if interested—provided their contact data for a telephone counselling session.

Results: Of the total patients, 5.40% were interested in the telephone counselling. Most of these patients had never sought help for their nightmare condition before. This percentage is much lower than in a previous study, possibly due to the higher time expenditure related to the new consent procedure.

Conclusion: The findings indicate that patients with nightmare problems can be reached with this approach even though they have never sought professional help before. In order to minimize the threshold, it would be desirable to have clinical in-house nightmare counselling, which would not require a detailed study information brochure and informed consent.