DREAMS (Dementia Related Manual for Sleep) START

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  DREAMS START (Dementia Related Manual for Sleep; Strategies for Relatives)

• IRAS ID

  199820

• Contact name

  Gill Livingston

• Contact email

  g.livingston@ucl.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University College London

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 9 months, 1 days

• Research summary

  There are expected to be 850000 people in the UK in 2015 living with dementia, two-thirds in the community. UK dementia care costs £26.3 billion.
  Sleep disturbances in dementia are common and varied, including reduced night time sleeping, night wandering and excessive daytime sleepiness. Sleep influences all aspects of life and is important in day-to-day function and quality of life. Family carers are often woken by their relatives’ sleep difficulties and become very tired. They may feel depressed and be unable to continue caring at home. Night time care costs can be unaffordable for those wishing to continue caring at home.
  We propose to develop (in consultation with families and people with dementia) an intervention for people with dementia and sleep disturbance living at home, based on the existing evidence as to what works.
  In practice, most people with dementia in the study, will have carers with them most nights, as they will either be referred because disturbing people sleeping
  in the same house, or be unsafe to leave alone. We will develop a manual so it can be used by others. We will then test feasibility for a fullscale trial through a small randomised study (40 participants in intervention and 20 in non-intervention group). We will measure whether people attend, the need for sleep medication and use other scales we would use in a full scale study, e.g. CSRI which details services used (measuring usual practice in the non-intervenion group and cost), carers sleep and ask families about their experience. The whole study will take 21 months. As the causes of sleep disturbances in dementia differ, our intervention will be tailored to the person with dementia’s individual problems and be delivered individually, through a partnership of health workers and family carers. The health worker will be a supervised psychology graduate, to enable roll-out.

• REC name

  London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  16/LO/0670

• Date of REC Opinion

  29 Apr 2016

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion