Abstract 13991: Sleep Patterns and Quality of Life in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension

Introduction: Data on sleep duration and quality of life (QOL) in PAH are limited to self-reported surveys. Commercial wearables represent a cost-effective, low-burden approach to objectively assess real-world sleep patterns. We aimed to describe sleep patterns and associations with quality of life (QOL) in a cohort of PAH patients.

Methods: We enrolled patients with expert adjudicated PAH from the NHLBI-funded Pulmonary Vascular Disease Phenomics (PVDOMICS) and compared them with individuals from the All of Us Research Program matched on age, sex, body mass index, and monitoring dates. Sleep variables were measured using Fitbit devices, which patients wore continuously for 12 weeks at baseline and again after 1 year. In PAH patients, QOL (Minnesota Living with Heart Failure (MLHF) survey) was assessed at baseline and 1 year; higher MLHF scores indicate greater impairment.

Results: We enrolled 36 patients with PAH (48.9 ± 13.2 years, 81% female). Total minutes in bed and total minutes per sleep stage at baseline and 1 year follow-up are shown in Table 1. Compared with matched controls, patients with PAH have similar minutes in bed and asleep but markedly reduced minutes of deep (p<0.001) and REM sleep (p <0.001). In the PAH cohort, changes in sleep parameters from baseline to year 1 correlated inversely with changes in MLHF emotional score from baseline to year 1 including: time in bed (r = - 0.61, p = 0.017), total minutes asleep (r = -0.59, p = 0.020), total minutes light sleep (r = -0.53, p = 0.041), and total minutes deep sleep (r = - 0.52, p = 0.047). Minutes of deep and REM sleep over 1 year were inversely correlated with medication escalation over that year (rs = -0.49 and -0.47, p<0.02 for both). No sleep measures correlated with baseline 6-minute walk distance.

Conclusions: Patients with PAH have poor sleep quality compared to healthy controls. Poor sleep quality may contribute to or result from some of the common symptoms of PAH such as fatigue, mood disorders, and decreased QOL.