A lack of sleep can be as potent as alcohol in impairing a driver’s ability. Sleep deprivation also makes a person a poor communicator and bad decision-maker.
And on average, Americans are sleeping 20 percent less than they did a century ago.
“Our biology has not changed by 20 percent. It’s our lifestyles that have changed,” said Adam Moscovitch, a sleep researcher with the Canadian Institute of Sleep Medicine in Calgary, Alberta.
International sleep researchers, gathered in Denver this week, said they are documenting a broad array of problems related to Americans’ growing sleep deficit.
Sleep-deprived people often don’t realize they’re making bad decisions or taking longer to react, said Hans Van Dongen, from the University of Pennsylvania, at a conference session.
“And there’s no Breathalyzer for sleep deprivation,” Van Dongen said.
Among the findings researchers of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies discussed Monday at the Colorado Convention Center were:
People who didn’t sleep for 20 hours drove as poorly as those with blood alcohol of 0.08 percent, the legal limit for driving in Colorado.
Three days after a sleepless night on call, medical residents still performed poorly on simple tests.
Sleep-deprived subjects became less inhibited during a test that involved pushing buttons.
College students failed reading comprehension tasks after missing a single night’s sleep.
The Canadian Institute’s Moscovitch presented initial results from a program to assess and improve the sleep habits of Canadian and U.S. truck drivers.
Twenty-three of 29 Canadian truckers reported making several fatigue-related mistakes a year, and most drivers said they get less sleep than they’d like, Moscovitch reported. But truckers given free medical evaluations and advice quickly changed their habits, Moscovitch said.
Eight men diagnosed with sleep apnea, for example, were sleeping three hours more per night, on average, after just a few months, he said.
June Pilcher, a psychologist at Clemson University in South Carolina, found that reading comprehension took a serious hit when undergraduate students were sleep-deprived.
She gave her students problems from SAT tests that involve reading paragraphs and answering simple questions.
“They cannot do it,” Pilcher said.
She and others suspect laboratory studies underestimate sleep-deprivation effects, because subjects tend to overcompensate in test situations.
Adam Wertz, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, reported that during “sleep inertia,” that grogginess upon waking, people performed some tasks even more poorly than when sleep-deprived.
Wertz and his colleagues asked subjects to solve addition problems in their heads.
“This has serious safety implications for occupations in which people are required to perform cognitive tasks immediately on awaking from sleep,” he said.
On average, Moscovitch said, sleep researchers don’t get any more sleep than anyone else.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
