A Pilot Study to Examine Sleep and Fatigue in Pediatric Brain Tumor Patients Hospitalized for High Dose Chemotherapy

The purpose of this pilot study is to determine if patients randomized to a hospital sleep environment intervention would have improved sleep quality and reduced fatigue as compared to the patients not receiving the intervention (standard care).

All patients enrolled on SJMB03 and admitted to receive either the 2nd or 3rd course of chemotherapy will be eligible for the study. The patients are admitted for four to six days and all participants will wear an actigraph to collect information on 8 sleep quality indicators for each of the six days. In addition, fatigue measurements will also be collected and compared between the two groups. Given the nature of the intervention, it is difficult to follow the traditional randomization scheme and randomize eligible patients to the intervention or standard care because there is a high likelihood of design contamination secondary to interactions among family members and among the nurses in regards to the different care for the study participants in the two study groups. Therefore, this study will use a group randomized trial design with patients randomized by month. That is, all patients admitted in a month randomized to be an intervention month will receive the intervention and all patients admitted to a standard care month will not receive the intervention. This type of randomization plan has notable strengths that match this study design but it also has two potential challenges: 1) patients randomized within the last five days of each month will continue to receive the assigned treatment to which they were randomized although this treatment assignment will continue into a different month that could have been randomized to the same or different condition as the previous month, and 2) with random assignments of months to the two treatment arms, there is a possibility of an unequal distribution of patients randomized to the two groups.