Health literacy and sleep disorders: a review.

Sleep medicine is a rapidly growing field with a continuing need to educate its patients. The ability of patients to understand information necessary to make appropriate health care choices and engage in positive health care behaviors is impacted by their health literacy. Low health literacy has been demonstrated to affect health outcomes in numerous disease states. Few interventions to circumvent this have been studied, and even fewer have been successful. Health literacy issues may directly affect a clinician's ability to care for sleep disorder patients effectively. Further research needs to be done to investigate the prevalence and impact of low health literacy in patients with sleep disorders.