*Purpose: To investigate sleep quality and explore potential contributing factors that affect sleep in renal transplant patients.

*Methods: Subjects were recruited from Perioperative renal transplant patients. An overnight polysomnography was performed to evaluate the sleep quantity, timing and quality of subjects after transplantation. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and Richards-Campbell Sleep questionnaire (RCSQ) were respectively used to assess self-report sleep quality before and after transplantation. In addition, subject’s clinical data, general demographics, noise and light during sleep monitoring, Fatigue severity scale (FSS), Mini-mental state examination (MMSE), Hamilton Anxiety and Depressing scale (HAMA&HAMD) and Pain index (PI) were also completed to explore the variables affecting sleep.

*Results: 74 subjects were recruited with 68 were valid data. In the PSQI, poor sleep quality (global PSQI>7) was observed in 49(72.1%) subjects before renal transplantation. While in the early post-renal transplantation, poor sleepers rose to 60 (88.2%) and then decreased to 26 (35.3%) in the discharge. Shallow depth of sleep, increased number of wakefulness and shorten sleep latency were major performance in polysomnography. At the same time, The self-report RCSQ also demonstrated positively correlated with polysomnography in the domains of sleep depth, awakenings and total sleep time.(P <0.01) The main sleep disturbing factors was gender, age, pain, the use of steroids, noise and light during sleep, length of post-renal transplantation, kidney function and depressive symptoms(P<0.05).

*Conclusions: The sleep quality in the early post-renal transplantation patients is lower than before and improves over time. RCSQ shows the moderate relations with polysomnography and can be used as an effective sleep monitoring tool in post renal transplantation patients. Pain, use of steroids noise and light and depressive symptoms are the main distress of patients with poor sleep quality.

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