A Review of Psychological and Personality Characteristics on Pap Therapy Adherence Among Sleep Disordered Breathing Patients

Sleep disordered breathing (SDB) is a common health problem with significant morbidity and mortality.Positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy is the accepted first-line treatment for SDB.Despite the documented efficacy of PAP therapy in the treatment of SDB, patient adherence is problematic.Proposed reasons for this nonadherence include patient-related, therapy/medicationrelated, and health professional-related factors.Some research studies have been published regarding the relationship between patient psychological or personality characteristics and adherence with PAP therapy.These studies can be divided into two groups.The first group focuses on psychological/personality characteristics of SDB patients.These studies claim that hypochondriasis, depression, memory and some cognitive function impairment are prevalent among SDB patients.Patients with these psychological and personality characteristics report more symptoms and complaints compared to other SDB patients.The second group examines the PAP adherence and psychological/ personality characteristics.They report that PAP adherence may negatively correlate with Type D personality, hypochondriasis, claustrophobia, depression, neuroticism, and BIS while may be positively associated with BAS-FS, and intellect imagination.However, limited data, the significant difference of the methods, techniques, number of cases and results of the studies, and contribution of multiple other factors make it difficult to draw a reliable conclusion.More specific studies with larger sample size on proposed psychological/personality variables would give a more clear understanding of this problem.