Italians don’t sleep enough: almost 30% of adults in Italy report not getting enough rest and about 14% are dissatisfied with the quality of their sleep, with an estimated clinical diagnosis of insomnia for a population between 16 and 27%. This is the picture taken by Santagostino Monitoring on the occasion of the World Sleep Day celebrated on March 15th.

The importance of sleep and its influence on health and overall well-being is now well known, and can have daytime consequences for the body related to mood, attention deficits and reduced performance. In the long term, poor sleep quality can in fact cause the development or worsening of problems with the immune, endocrine, inflammatory and cardiovascular systems, but can also be associated with the onset of psychiatric and psychological pathologies.

For this reason, as recent scientific studies have also shown, cognitive-behavioral therapies can have positive effects in the treatment of all sleep disorders. This thesis is also confirmed in the clinical practice conducted by the multidisciplinary team at the Santagostino insomnia clinics.

Since 2022, “Dormi” has been introduced to help with the diagnosis. This is an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm, certified as a medical device, which was created from a partnership with the start-up Sleepacta and Professor Ugo Faraguna of the University of Pisa. This collaboration is being renewed to continue research and development of this sophisticated technology capable of processing all data collected during sleep hours through a wearable device, certified as a medical device and validated in numerous clinical studies, to provide an objective measurement of the patient’s sleep.

Thanks to the data collected, the doctor can have much more accurate information to arrive at a precise diagnosis in a non-invasive way, a significant advantage over other diagnostic approaches applied to sleep clinics that disturb sleep in order to measure it.

“Having a set of objective data on sleep quality, such as movements or heartbeats, can improve the timing and accuracy of diagnosis and direct the patient to the most appropriate therapeutic path,” emphasizes Renata Del Giudice, psychotherapist at Santagostino Psiche. “In general, today we talk about ‘Insomnia Disorder’, which can also be diagnosed in the presence of an association with other medical or psychiatric pathologies. Very often, in fact, it is difficult to understand whether insomnia is a consequence of other pathologies, or is aggravated by them, or whether in some cases it predicts their onset. And this new classification is fundamental to consider insomnia as a specific disorder, to give it the right value and thus set up a targeted treatment even in the presence of other pathologies.”

Recent scientific studies have confirmed that cognitive-behavioral therapy is the main treatment for chronic insomnia in adults of all ages. It is based on the psychophysiological models of sleep and acts on all those behavioral, cognitive and physiological characteristics that perpetuate the sleep disturbance over time. At the end of these pathways, patients have increased their sleep quality by an average of 6.56 points on a scale of 0 to 21. In addition, the duration of sleep has increased by an average of 0.62 hours.

Data also confirmed by Santagostino where, at the end of the pathway, more than 90% of patients, in line with the trends observed in the scientific literature on the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral therapies included in the European guidelines as first-line treatment for insomnia disorders, no longer have a condition classifiable as clinically relevant, and the rest still show an improvement in their condition.

To order the Dormi service: https://www.santagostino.it/it/dormi