Abstract

Background: Insomnia is one of the most prevalent sleep disorders worldwide. Insomnia evaluation needs a comprehensive examination of patients’ sleep-related symptoms, history of medical conditions, and psychiatric health.

Aim: To evaluate the relationship between insomnia, related complaints with anxiety, chronic diseases, and sleep hygiene in collegiate young adults.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional study with a simple random sampling method performed on collegiate young adults (n: 484, and age: 21.8±4.1 years) at Mizan-Aman, Ethiopia. A brief questionnaire for screening insomnia along with Sleep hygiene index (SHI), Generalized anxiety disorder – 7 scale (GAD-7), and a participants’ characteristics questionnaire was employed. Binary logistic regression was performed for the association between dichotomized measures (presence/absence of insomnia and presence/absence of related complaints) with their predictors.

Result: Insomnia was associated with male gender (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 6.52, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.52–16.88), chronic diseases(AOR = 4.37, 95% CI 1.83-10.46), mild anxiety(AOR = 3.76, 95% CI 1.51-9.39), moderate-severe anxiety(AOR = 2.86, 95% CI 1.10-7.49) and increasing SHI scores (AOR = 1.69, 95% CI 1.43-2.00). Similarly, all the insomnia-related complaints were associated with male gender, presence of chronic diseases, mild-severe level of anxiety, and increasing SHI scores.

Conclusion: Mild-severe levels of anxiety, poor sleep hygiene, chronic conditions, and male gender were identified as correlates of insomnia and its related complaints. These findings may help in the identification of vulnerable sub-sections of collegiate young adults, i.e., those having predictor conditions for targeted screening of insomnia.

Keywords: Insomnia; insomnia symptomology;poor sleep hygiene; anxiety; chronic diseases