The Cumulative Effect of Chronic Insomnia: Yuri Maricich, MD, MBA

WATCH TIME: 3 minutes

“We have seen before the reduction in medications, but in my experience as an internal medicine physician, I’m familiar with patients, for example, with severe neurologic diseases—like Parkinson’s—or heart failure, ending up in the hospital or the ER. But it was not commonplace for me to expect patients with poor sleep to end up in the ER.”

Among those with chronic disease—and even those without such conditions—the effect that poor sleep can have on their symptoms and disease can be profound. This is effect is felt even more so by those with chronic sleep disorders, such as insomnia. There are therapeutic treatments are available for these individuals, but many patients face refractory disease that cannot be completely controlled.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for insomnia has emerged in recent years as an option for those who have not been able to able to achieve full benefits from pharmacologic treatment. A recent study assessing the potential of this CBT approach was conducted by a group including Yuri Maricich, MD, MBA, internal medicine physician, and chief medical officer and head of development, Pear Therapeutics. They published data from a real-world cohort of individuals who utilized the digital therapeutic Somryst (previously known as SHUTi), which showed positive results for reductions in healthcare resource utilization, associated costs, and insomnia severity effects of the therapy.¹

To find out more about these findings and their implications—as well as the cumulative effect of poor sleep can have on overall health—NeurologyLive® sat down with Maricich to discuss the data in-depth. He offered his perspective on the current assessment of sleep in clinical practice and the benefits of CBT approaches.

REFERENCE
1. Forma F, Knight TG, Thorndike FP, et al. Real-World Evaluation of Clinical Response and Long-Term Healthcare Resource Utilization Patterns Following Treatment with a Digital Therapeutic for Chronic Insomnia. Clinicoecon Outcomes Res. 2022;14:537-546. doi:10.2147/CEOR.S368780