Sleep may impact mortality in lung transplant recipients

(HealthDay)—For lung transplant recipients, sleep should be assessed in order to better clarify the predictors of post-transplant mortality, according to a letter to the editor published online April 18 in the American Journal of Transplantation.

In response to a study examining psychosocial risk factors of mortality in lung transplant recipients, Vanessa L. Gutiérrez, from the Universidade Federal de São Paulo in Brazil, and colleagues discuss sleep as an additional confounding factor.

The researchers note that individuals with psychiatric disorders often present with sleep disorders, including insomnia, and that insomnia increases depression symptoms and poor mental health. This correlation has been identified in transplanted patients. Mood factors and poor sleep could be involved in post-transplant decreased quality of life and premature mortality. In transplanted patients, the correlation between sleep and mood is likely to have bidirectional causality.

"Thus, we believe that the assessment of sleep and their features would better clarify the predictors of mortality in the post-transplant patients of the study from Smith et al, due to evidence of the relationship between poor sleep, mood disorders, and mortality," the authors write.